Modeling and Measuring DevOps Culture
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Culture is very important in DevOps. It is the first thing in every definition of DevOps, but how can you measure it? Culture is intangible, hard to change, and it is of vital importance to your company and your employee’s satisfaction. Everyone agrees that a culture of trust and collaboration is key to a successful DevOps transformation. Having a culture of collaboration where people feel safe to share their views and work across a diverse group is a must for a successful organization. But how do we measure culture? In this session we will talk about the culture of DevOps and how the culture enable information flow through organizations. We talk about the Westrum Typology of Organizational Culture and how organizational culture predicts the way information flows through an organization. We’ll talk about how to measure your culture based on the Westrum Typology and steps to move to a generative culture of high trust and high collaboration across the organization.
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Modeling and Measuring DevOps Culture
- 1. Modeling and Measuring DevOps Culture “To change the culture you have to change the organization” – Scaled Agile
- 2. Bio • Email: Leland.newsom@yahoo.com • Twitter: @LelandNewsom • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lelandnewsom/ • Slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/LelandNewsom • Past roles include: • Developer • Manager • Managing Director • Technical Director
- 3. What’s Your Definition of Organizational Culture?
- 4. Examples of When Values Differ from Behaviors • Value work life balance – but has team events after work • Value a learning culture – has lunch and learns and pays for other ways to learn on your personal time • Value doing it right – but rewards the firefighters • Values teamwork – but individual performance management compares individuals • Values innovation – but doesn’t give time for exploration or allow for failures • Values quality – but pushes un-realistic delivery dates or doesn’t allow for time for practices like TDD
- 5. 7 Definition DevOps is those set of cultural norms and technology practices that enable the fast flow of planned work from, among others, development, through tests into operations while preserving world class reliability, operation, and security.
- 7. Before DevOps Culture • DevOps Culture is about collaboration between Development and Operations. • Under the traditional separation between Dev and Ops, Dev and Ops have different and opposing goals Development Speed Operations Stability
- 8. After DevOps Culture • DevOps Culture is about collaboration between Development and Operations. • With DevOps, Dev and Ops work together and share the same goals. Speed and Stability Development and Operations
- 9. Google’s Aristotle Project • 2 year study of 180+ active Google Teams to answer, “What makes a team effective at Google?” • “Who is on the team matters less than how the team members interact, structure of their work, and view their contributions.” • It all comes down to team dynamics and how culture influences those dynamics. • High level of psychological safety • Culture of collaboration & experimentation is key https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
- 11. What is DevOps Culture • Shared values and behaviors • There’s no right culture for DevOps, but there are characteristics: • Respect and Trust • High Psychological Safety • High Cooperation • Open Communication • Collaboration • Flexible • Supportive • Open to experimentation • Continuously improving Continuous Experimentation Amplify Feedback LoopsSystem Flow Lean & Agile Principles Product Centric Continuous Flow and Visibility Culture Practices Performance Oriented Innovative Sharing High Trust Culture High Cooperation Collaboration Continuously Improving Empowered Employees Infrastructure Automation Continuous Delivery Monitor Everything Release Management Version Control Everything Trunk Based Development Continuous Integration Continuous Testing Reduced Lead Time for Changes DevOps Business Enabling Responsiveness Modified from: https://devops.com/interconnect-2016-culture-matters/
- 12. What is DevOps Culture • Shared values and behaviors • There’s no right culture for DevOps, but there are characteristics: • Respect and Trust • High Psychological Safety • High Cooperation • Open Communication • Collaboration • Flexible • Supportive • Open to experimentation • Continuously improving • If your organization isn’t these things, you have to build them. Continuous Experimentation Amplify Feedback LoopsSystem Flow Lean & Agile Principles Product Centric Continuous Flow and Visibility Culture Practices Performance Oriented Innovative Sharing High Trust Culture High Cooperation Collaboration Continuously Improving Empowered Employees Infrastructure Automation Continuous Delivery Monitor Everything Release Management Version Control Everything Trunk Based Development Continuous Integration Continuous Testing Reduced Lead Time for Changes DevOps Business Enabling Responsiveness Modified from: https://devops.com/interconnect-2016-culture-matters/ If we don’t pay attention to culture The practices will not reach their full potential
- 13. Pathological (Power-oriented) Bureaucratic (Rule-oriented) Generative (Performance-oriented) Low cooperation Modest cooperation High cooperation Messengers shot Messengers neglected Messengers trained Responsibility shirked Narrow responsibilities Risks are shared Bridging discouraged Bridging tolerated Bridging encouraged Failure leads to scapegoating Failure leads to justice Failure leads to inquiry Novelty crushed Novelty leads to problems Novelty implemented Typology of Organizational Culture (Westrum, 1994)
- 14. What Does Westrum’s Organizational Culture Predict? • Westrum’s theory hypothesizes that organizations with better information flow function more effectively. • The most critical issue for organizational safety is the flow of information • Generative organizations have good information flow, high cooperation and trust • Culture can predict both software delivery performance and organizational performance. • Mirrors the research performed by Google into how to create high-performing teams • Software Delivery Performance measured by: • Deployment Frequency • Lead Time for Changes • MTTR • Change Failure Rate • Organization performance is correlated with deployment pain. The more painful code deployments are, the poorer the culture. Westrum Organizational Culture Organizational Performance Software Delivery Performance
- 15. How Organizations Respond to Anomalous Information 1. “Shoot the messenger” 2. If messenger wasn’t executed, information might be isolated. 3. If message got out, it could be “put in context” through PR strategy. 4. Only fix the immediate event (local fix) 5. Look for other examples of the same thing and fix (global fix) 6. Engage in inquiry, to not only fix the current event, but also it’s underlying root cause. Scale of reactions: Suppression Public Relations Global Fix **@***************@***************@***************@***************@***************@** Encapsulation Local Fix Inquiry Westrum, Ron. (2014). The study of information flow: A personal journey. Safety Science. 67. 58–63. 10.1016/j.ssci.2014.01.009.
- 16. How to Measure Westrum Organizational Culture in a Statistically Valid & Reliable Way Use a scale from “1=Strongly Disagree” to “7=Strongly Agree”: • On my team, information is actively sought. • On my team, failures are learning opportunities, and messengers of them are not punished. • On my team, responsibilities are shared. • On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded. • On my team, failure causes inquiry. • On my team, new ideas are welcomed. These questions come from peer-reviewed research by Nicole Forsgren. More info can also be found in the book “Accelerate” by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim 3-Somewhat Disagree 2-Disagree 1-Strongly Disagree 4-Neutral 5-Somewhat Agree 6-Agree 7-Strongly Agree
- 17. How to Build a Generative Culture Characteristics of a Generative Culture DevOps Practices High Cooperation Cross-functional teams. Create cross-functional teams that include representatives from each functional area of the software delivery process. Messengers trained Blameless Postmortems. By removing blame, you remove fear, you enable teams to more effectively surface problems and solve them. Mistakes happen; holding blameless postmortems or blameless problem solving/issue resolution is a valuable way to learn from mistakes. Risks are Shared Shared Responsibility. Quality, availability, reliability, and security are everyone’s job. The improvement in collaboration that comes from sharing responsibility inherently reduces risk. Bridging encouraged Breaking down silos. In addition to creating cross-functional teams, techniques for breaking down silos can include co-locating or embedding ops with the dev team or including ops in planning throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Failure leads to inquiry Blameless postmortems. Your response to failure shapes the culture of the organization. The more you focus on the conditions in which failures happen, as opposed to blaming individuals for failures, the closer you’ll get to creating a generative culture. Novelty implemented Experimentation Time. Giving employees freedom to explore new ideas can lead to great outcomes. Some companies give engineers time each week for experimentation. Others host internal hack-a-thons or hold internal conferences to share ideas and collaborate. Jesse Newland, “ChatOps at Github” March 26, 2013 https://www.slideshare.net/DevOpstastic/how-devops-drives-organisational-change
- 18. 5 Steps for Creating a High-Performing DevOps Culture 1. Build Trust and Make Psychological Safety a Priority • Be open to new ideas • Don’t shoot the messenger • Take a community approach to solving problems • Push decisions to who has the information • Hold “blameless postmortems” • Everyone responsible for quality • Treat each individual on the team as valuable equals 2. Support a Culture of Learning & Sharing • Uncover better ways of working and implement them • Turn local discoveries into global improvements • Encourage learning from mistakes • Encourage sharing and create opportunities to share information • Invest in everyone’s growth and learning • Improve flow of information and communication channels 3. Experiment Often • “Out-experiment the competition” • Build “safe to fail” systems that let you build and deploy small changes • Use experimentation as a way to learn and pivot 4. Make Monitoring and Recovery a Priority • Put sufficient monitoring in place to quickly find out what is going wrong, restore service and resume operations • Detect and correct problems before customer impact 5. Break down silos • Build cross-functional teams • Embed Ops with development teams • Dev assist with deployment, monitoring, and recovery • Ops included in sprint planning, software design, testing, and feature development
- 19. Agility Health Radar – DevOps Assessment • The AHR DevOps assessment provides a way to capture the Culture of Improvement dimension quantitatively • Efficiency & Collaboration • Global Sharing • Collective Ownership • Process Effectiveness • Cross-Functional Teams • Enabling Business Agility • Leadership • Impediment Mgmt. • Tech Debt. Mgmt. • Enabling Innovation • Risk Taking • Feedback Loops • Learn & Experiment
- 21. Culture Changes Are Hard and Take Time • Culture lags because people need to see the new way of working is a better way of working • Don’t try to change old habits – replace them with new, competing habits and let the old habits fade away • Create experiments to demonstrate the benefits of new habits • Measure outcomes from experiments and pivot or persevere based on learnings from empirical evidence • Celebrate small wins
- 22. Continuously Improve “Continuous Improvement is better than delayed perfection. ₋ Mark Twain
- 24. Learn More • 2017 State of DevOps Report • https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report • Interconnect 2016: Culture Matters • https://devops.com/interconnect-2016-culture-matters/ • A Scientific Approach to IT Performance, Nicole Forsgren • https://devops-research.com/research.html • The study of information flow: A personal journey, Ron Westrum • https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261186680_The_study_of_information_flow_A_personal_journey • Using the Westrum typology to measure culture • https://www.andykelk.net/devops/using-the-westrum-typology-to-measure-culture • Which Comes First DevOps or Culture Change – Information Week • https://www.informationweek.com/devops/which-comes-first-devops-or-culture-change/a/d-id/1328714 • What is your organizational culture: Pathological, Bureaucratic, or Generative? • http://www.talenttalks.net/organizational-culture-pathological-bureaucratic-generative/ 29