All tagged DevOps
Taking a look at Will Kelly’s article on Do DevOps and the Theory of Constraints still relate with my perspective on the Theory of Constraints and the five focusing steps. I suspect there are some familiar mis-apprehensions of TOC embedded in the article. Happy to discuss!
I had the great pleasure of attending the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas Virtual last week. I share many common interests with the DevOps community through my interest in flow and continuous improvement. There were topics throughout the three days (and extended beyond the conference time, as the videos were available to watch later) that could be applied anywhere, which is why I was participating. Looking through my notes, here are some items that sparked interest and joy for me.
My review of Gene Kim’s upcoming book, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data (due at the end of November). It’s an interesting read, describing a path to an amazing turnaround of a doomed technology inside a traditional business. The Five Ideals are a nice encapsulation of many of the ways people talk about continuous improvement with a notable addition of Psychological Safety.
I recently read a pair of books that talk about project management shifting into product management - both of which seem to blame the woes of organizations on project management. One is Mik Kersten’s Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, and the other is more of a work-in-process book (and free) #noprojects: A Culture of Continuous Value by Evan Leybourn and Shane Hastie.
Overall, these books present some interesting ideas on how to think of delivering value - whether it is in a project environment or not. And they present a few frustrations for me in that I don’t think the core problem is due to “projects.” I think it is deeper embedded into organizations that are so fractured that the flow of value has been lost. Lets get that righted, and project management AND product management work much better.
The latest DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. Amongst the videos and tweets and blog posts that have come out of the event was a quick interview with Gene Kim on the Agile Amped podcast with Greg Bledsoe of SolutionsIQ.
Gene Kim and John Willis recorded a set of conversations called Beyond the Phoenix Project to talk about the DevOps movement since the publication of The Phoenix Project. (It’s available as an audio and a transcription.) I very much appreciate that the thinking behind DevOps has been geared around learning and applying concepts and ideas from all of these areas. I'm sure there are cargo-cultists who simply try to mimic what they see other people doing, but the people who are developing and growing in DevOps are clearly those who are looking at the giants that have come before them, climbing up on their shoulders, doing something new that is relevant to their current view of the world, and then sharing that back with the community to test and refine and develop further. I got a strong sense of excitement and desire to learn from this.
Too high work-in-process (WIP) is dangerous for all sorts of reasons in almost any organization. It slows everything down like the molasses in winter. But simply saying “cut WIP” without understanding why it remains so high is a recipe for disaster. Let’s think about this a little.
Evgeny Zislis has a great piece on DevOps Transformation using Theory of Constraints, where he takes us through the 4 Questions for Technology. The short version of the discussion is that it is far too easy for people to apply the tools and outward signs of <pick your poison> without fully taking the change on board. And as a result, the power behind that change is never fully released.
Gene Kim gave a great plenary at the Building on Success 2017 conference that described how TOC and related thinking can create truly breakthrough operations for technology.