DevOps InstituteDevOps Journey Playbook

May 12, 2020

Culture:How To Build A Winning DevOps Culture Of Innovation

By Shaaron A Alvares, Sr. Agile & DevOps Transformation Coach at T-Mobilewith Eveline Oehrlich, JP Garbani and Karen Skiles, DevOps Institute

Shaaron A Alvares Eveline Oehrlich

The key challenges to DevOps adoption and transformation are not technology related but organizational and cultural. Leaders must invest in their DevOps organizational change capability and their cultural people strategies in order to remain competitive while delivering continuous value at scale. We identified DevOps cultural characteristics that are required to support organizations’ DevOps adoption goals, continuous innovation, speed and quality at scale. Creating cultures of high trust and collaboration, enabling continuous experimentation, improvement, and upskilling are key investments that support DevOps return on investments.

Executive Summary

Creating a Culture to SupportDevOps Transformation

As major global organizations are adopting or scaling their DevOps capability, 75% of these initiatives will fail to meet their objectives through 2022, according to Gartner1. The top reasons are not related to technology but to managing the organizational, cul-tural, and people side of the change. As John Willis shared in 20102, “If you do not have a culture to support your DevOps adoption, all automation attempts will be fruitless.” While the focus remains on the DevOps technology and tooling, more research and sur-veys conclude that DevOps is primarily about culture and its success is ultimately based on creating a culture sponsored by leadership that effectively accelerates cross-function-al and generational collaboration3 innovation and supports technological investments. A recent MIT Sloan management Review and Glassdoor study4 confirmed that healthy corporate cultures positively impact results and revenue. Based on surveys across multi-ple high performing organizations, the study identified “Big Nine Cultural Values”.

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DevOps Requires Moving Away from Taylorism Leadership Principles

Although considered to be a team focused culture, DevOps requires a radically different approach to leadership that encourages autonomy to support the pace of rapid innova-tion. This leadership style requires moving away from Taylorism and adopting values and principles inspired from Westrum and Transformational Leadership models. Within these models, leaders work closely with teams to design and adopt a company culture based on empowerment, ownership, and shared accountability. Both models are focused on moti-vating and inspiring individuals in a positive way.

Westrum leadership model supports positive climates: In 2004, Ron Westrum published “A Typology of Organiza-tional Cultures5” where he introduced three organizational culture models, “Pathological”, “Bureaucratic”, and “Genera-tive”. Each are characterized by seven cultural criteria relat-ed to authority and leadership, communication and collabo-ration, supportive or punitive environment, and employees behavioral response to the models.

In order to embrace DevOps as a holistic framework and philosophy, and fully benefit from its potential, organiza-tions need to work towards becoming a “Generative” culture and establish the level of collaboration and cooperation, openness and transparency that teams and individuals need to be successful. A Generative culture focuses on a positive climate of motivation, encouragement, failure as opportuni-ties, affirmative, and nurturing support, rather than seeking to blame and punish experiments.

Transformational leaders inspire others: The concepts of transformational leadership were introduced by James Downton in 1973. In 1985, Bernard Bass6 later introduced better ways for measuring the impact of transformational leadership on people and organizations. Transformational leadership believes that employees are inspired to deliv-er their best and feel engaged when leaders demonstrate ethics, authenticity, accountability, and empathy. Leaders understand the importance of trained employees and relay the decision-making process down to teams to give them the ability to be more creative and innovative. Key trans-formational leadership continuously displays authenticity, cooperation, transparency, and open communication. In these organizations, leaders foster a vision with clear values, goals, and priorities. They model behaviors themselves that encourage teams and individuals to embrace a mindset of trust, empathy, and collaboration enabling them to focus their energy delivering on common shared goals. Bass add-ed that leaders need to rise above their own self-interest and prioritize the ethical interest of the organization and its employees.

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Reward Innovation through Continuous Experimentation and Relentless Improvements

Innovating means generating and trying new ideas. For this reason, the most innovative DevOps organizations and culture not only support experimentation, but they encourage and reward it through various active strategies such as Test & Learn practices, Hack-athons, and continuous collaboration with customers and end users. Through the intro-duction of these practices, organizations and leadership progressively learn to change their attitude towards failure. Teams that are empowered to experiment and decide on improvement opportunities develop a great sense of purpose and ownership leading to greater engagement. The following are key concepts to inspire innovation.

Continuous experimentation leads to new ideas: The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)7 reported that successful teams are empowered to experiment with new ideas and to make changes to features without having to request permission from management. As they experiment, they can and will fail. Leadership and management need to support and reward an environment where developers will be confident trying and testing new ideas, which in turn leads to creating a culture of learning. A key objective and benefit of testing, failing fast, and learning is to mitigate the risks of making major investments in initiatives that will not work. Booking.com established a culture of experimentation and testing supported by one of their core company te-nets: Anyone can test anything; this without management’s permission. This culture allowed the company to transform from a start-up to being one of the world’s largest online accommodation platforms8.

Relentless improvements focus on continuously challenging the status quo: Leveraging the principle of relentless im-provements enables a team to challenge the existing status quo and look for areas to holistically improve processes, technology, performance, speed, resources, and investments to support innovation velocity, time to market, and quality. This means moving away from a mindset of defined long-term goals and perfectionism. Organizations need to design flexible systems, teams’ structures, and ways of collabo-rating and making decisions to not only quickly identify opportunities but to quickly act on them. LEGO success-fully reinvented itself by establishing Lean and continuous improvement strategies empowering any employee to log improvement ideas and opportunities in an application accessible globally across the company. They shifted their ways of working to include rapid prototyping and customer involvement in product design.

Team autonomy and empowerment fuel engagement and innovation: When autonomous teams are empowered to not only establish their own work practices but also define features, they develop a stronger sense of purpose and engagement leading to greater knowledge, creative prob-lem-solving, and innovation. Because they are proven to de-liver successful outcomes more consistently, many organiza-tions opt for these teams dynamic and structure over other types of teams. These successful empowered teams re-vealed a unique set of organizational requirements. Because they work to solve technology and integration problems across multiple disciplines, they need an organization-wide commitment from leadership to support their autonomy. Leaders must foster an entrepreneurial environment with a flatter, more adaptive reporting structure to enable quick decision-making and pivoting faster to market trends and changes. Lastly, leaders need to create an environment where everyone is a leader, and anyone can lead without a title. Leadership becomes an integral part of these organiza-tions’ DNA and their way of life. These organizations en-courage open space agility and ways of collaborating, there by inviting everyone to voice their ideas.

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Building a customer-obsessed culture leads to better products: The most successful companies do this by en-gaging their customers and end users in every step of the product lifecycle, from ideation to operationalization, and adoption measurement through telemetry. This results in effectively training engineering teams to empathize with customers, understand the business language, and build effective relationships with the people who buy their prod-ucts. Here are some ideas on how to do this. At the incep-tion steps, include engineers in ideation, iterative design thinking, human-centered mapping, and design workshops. Throughout the iterative development phase, invite real customers to test features in development stages. Orga-nizations should aspire to breaking down silos between engineering and product in new and creative ways9. An opportunity is to create Value Stream dojos to provide a more holistic product driven experience for customers and employees. Pivotal Labs invites real customers and end us-ers to interact with engineers and test features on a weekly basis. They then plug customer feedback and new requests back into the product backlog in real time. Amazon, who is the leader in customer-obsessed culture, built a culture and strategy not based on competition, but rather on customer obsession. Putting the customer’s experience first, they do not start working on a feature until they know how they will collect and measure their customers response and busi-ness outcomes. Based on his experience working at eBay, Google, and WeWork, Randy Shoup reminds us that “Teams also need to be directly aligned to business objectives, and capable of delivering incremental software traced directly to business objectives and customer value. Teams are also required to measure not only their engineering and develop-ment performance, but business metrics that matter to the end users.9”

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Create Diverse Teams and Grow Inclusive Teams

Cultures that have more diverse management teams drive 19% higher revenue due to innovation11. Racially diverse teams outperform non-diverse ones by 35%12. More than 67% of job seekers look for evidence of diversity before considering an organization or accepting an offer13. There is a well documented relationship between inclusion and innovation. Inclusive teams create more unlikely ideas. A diverse team of decision-makers prevents group thinking and bad product decisions. Yet many companies still struggle to create an inclusive environment for their teams. To create a more inclusive environment and culture, organizations need to design a strategy with clear objectives, make it a prior-ity with their employees, and measure and communicate the results. This can be done by adopting the following.

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Prioritize inclusive sourcing and hiring techniques: The most advanced technology organizations widen their sourcing net to include a more diverse population. Job descriptions are written in ways that appeal to diversity, women or a less ex-perienced workforce. Pivotal-VMware, as an example, intro-duced an explicit clause in each job description mentioning that the application will remain open until they have at least two qualified candidates from underrepresented communi-ties14. Adopting blind applications has proven to lead to more women applicants and hiring. Gartner15 suggests leveraging new artificial intelligence and behavior-analysis-powered applications to avoid unconscious biases in hiring and to boost team’s diversity. Effective techniques consist of involv-ing a diverse hiring panel and focus on recruiting for culture add rather than culture fit. These organizations demonstrate curiosity and interest in differences.

Inclusion as an everyone’s responsibility is a significant trend and imperative. Diversity moved from being the re-sponsibility of Human Resources to be everyone’s account-ability16. Research demonstrated that teams which operate in an inclusive culture outperform their peers by a staggering 80%17. Since Google’s Aristotle study18, DevOps managers and teams understand the relationship between safety, be-longing, productivity, and innovation. Teams, understanding that everyone’s voice is valuable and counts, take ownership in driving an inclusive team culture to ensure that everyone belongs and feels safe to share ideas and opinions.

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Sustain Innovation Through Learning and Upskilling

With the growing pace of technology innovation, creating a learning and upskilling or-ganization enables businesses to stay competitive while delivering on their digital trans-formation goals. The IT skill gaps costs organizations more than $800,000 annually19. DevOps organizations invest in learning and upskilling strategies as a mean to quickly adapt to the pace of change, maximize productivity and business continuity with existing resources. They attract, engage and retain the best developers and engineers, and deliver the best high-quality technology products and services to increase their customer base and revenue.

Upskilling cannot wait, it must be addressed now. Organi-zations need to create an agile learning and development strategy and systems able to pivot quickly to rapidly chang-ing technology trends20. Upskilling is still a new capability that organizations strive to address. The DevOps 2020 Upskilling Report found that over 38% of surveyed organi-zations do not have any upskilling strategy nor program and only 21% are currently working on building these21. More than 94% of employees would stay at their company longer if it had learning and development programs22 while orga-nizations are looking to hire E-shaped professionals with cross-functional skill23. Here in lies an opportunity.

Upskilling has key benefits for companies and individuals. The continuous change in business models and new tech-nology innovations forces an ongoing evaluation of new skill sets to achieve organizational success. The best candi-dates will move toward companies that offer upskilling and reskilling benefits. Learning opportunities can, therefore, become a significant employer branding advantage. Upskill-ing also protects business continuity by mitigating employee turnover and securing qualified in-house successors. Orga-nizations also know that all types of skills need to be con-tinuously built. Companies like Amazon, PWC, IBM, AT&T and JP Morgan Chase are all examples of companies which have placed significant investments into upskilling programs. Their goals are to foster a culture and accountability of life-long learning and clear career pathways.

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What It MeansDesign, Prioritize and Measure Your DevOps Culturefor Continuous Improvement

The cultural DevOps characteristics described above are among the most adopted and known to improve and accelerate organizational DevOps adoption and transformation. Each organization needs to design their own DevOps culture that best supports their journey, vision, and strategic business outcomes leveraging the pillars of DevOps culture (see Figure 1). As organizations thrive to adapt to the pace of change, digital transforma-tion, and technology innovation, leaders need to create a collaborative cultural roadmap to adopt the values and behaviors identified and required to support the business vision and goals, and continuously assess, measure and iterate on these. The following are key steps.

Figure 1:The Eight Pillarsof DevOps Culture

Source: Shaaron A Alvares

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Plan the DevOps Cultural Transformation: Framing the rea-sons why organizations are adopting DevOps and its impact for the business and on the organization, will lay the ground of the cultural transformation roadmap. The cultural change will be more effectively received if everyone in the organiza-tion understands how it anchors in and supports the technol-ogy roadmap.

Ensure that culture and technology align. The cultural trans-formation roadmap needs to work in tandem with the tech-nology roadmap in order to remain aligned and to timely address needs based on new information or challenges. Iden-tifying metrics across business, culture, and technology will allow organizations to monitor and measure the outcome of cultural investments. Those metrics can be the rate of innova-tion, time to market, team productivity, and happiness index.

Educate leaders about the DevOps cultural implications. Leaders tend to minimize or misunderstand the cultural implications of DevOps transformations. They need to be an integral part of the transformation. Develop a leadership plan to allow organizations to understand their role and responsi-bilities to steward the change more effectively.

Develop targeted cultural assessments. These assessments are great tools to collect and analyze cultural challenges spe-cific to the organization. Honest and transparent assessments through surveys, interviews, and informal forums such as a Slack feedback channel, will allow the transformation to have a baseline to start with and build upon.

Develop a cultural change transformation product backlog. The assessment will provide findings and feedback which should be available to the organization to continuously work on. It should be iterated on by a core transformational team which will work in tandem with leadership and the technolo-gy teams to continuously improve culture.

Create a network of change agents and coaches. They will support people and teams throughout the change. These individuals will be able to assist and advise throughout the journey.

Leverage open space agility and All Hands-on Deck tech-niques. This will allow the transformational teamto radically and intentionally include everyone in the work and execution roadmap. This approach drives a much higher employee engagement and satisfaction level because every-one feels empowered to contribute and feels consulted.

Create robust and sustainable empathy and feedback mech-anisms. Such feedback loops are key throughout the transfor-mation as they consistently integrate the feedback into the transformation product backlog.

Continuously iterate on the cultural transformation backlog. To do this it is best to leverage accomplishments, setbacks, and feedback. Working closely with the technology teams will help maintain and adjust the right pace and momentum.

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Develop a Value Stream dojo, instead of a DevOps dojo. DevOps dojos are focused almost exclusively on supporting technology adoption, whereas a Value Stream dojo invites all stakeholders of a value stream to develop collaborative adop-tion and improvement experimentations, coaching and train-ing. Value Stream dojos speed cross-functional collaboration, in particular between product and development.

Identify shared outcomes and metrics. It is critical to iden-tify cross-functional metrics, measure and communicate the cultural results and business outcomes throughout the trans-formation journey.

Communicate relentlessly the cultural changes and accom-plishments. The best way to sustain momentum is to make employees feel great about their engagement and their pos-itive impact on their organizational culture and innovation. Keep the big picture and system thinking in mind and always tie the cultural achievements back to the business and tech-nology roadmap.

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References

1 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-secret-to-devops-success/

2 https://blog.chef.io/what-devops-means-to-me/

3 https://insights.devopsinstitute.com/hubfs/Upskilling%202020/2020%20Upskilling-%20Enterprise%20

DevOps%20Skills%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=2020%20Upskilling%20Report%20-%20Promo&utm_

source=hs_automation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=84970497&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--GK0cf4KQZm_

DmYGowLDgY9KNoObTv3ALnAxF0J3agbff-ZKvybcKocsgT7tYswDMgAgvHIr8fUFLfu2VNNAfSDuSBCG_

jXMyXnvuxdVv-GMs_298&_hsmi=84970497

4 https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/measuring-culture-in-leading-companies/

5 https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_2/ii22

6 https://www.amazon.com/LEADERSHIP-PERFORMANCE-BEYOND-EXPECTATIONS-Bernard/

dp/0029018102/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318268507&sr=1-1-spell/bigdogsbowlofbis

7 https://cloud.google.com/devops

8 https://hbr.org/2020/03/productive-innovation

9 Breaking Down Silos Between Product management and Development: https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=7SGHStr4tZQ

10 https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/07/speed-scale-wework/?itm_source=infoq&itm_campaign=us-

er_page&itm_medium=link

11 https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation.aspx

12 https://blog.clearcompany.com/10-diversity-hiring-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-decisions

13 https://hbr.org/2019/02/research-when-gender-diversity-makes-firms-more-productive

14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT1qbLtm1u8

15 https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/01/team-inclusion-workplace-AI/

16 https://devopsinstitute.com/2020/04/03/inclusiveness-and-diversity-are-critical-for-transformatio-

nal-managers-and-teams-ep12/

17 https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/human-capital/deloitte-au-hc-diver-

sity-inclusion-soup-0513.pdf

18 https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

19 https://trainingmag.com/how-upskill-employees-fill-tech-skills-gap/

20 https://insights.devopsinstitute.com/hubfs/Upskilling%202020/2020%20Upskilling-%20Enterprise%20

DevOps%20Skills%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=2020%20Upskilling%20Report%20-%20Promo&utm_

source=hs_automation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=84970497&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--GK0cf4KQZm_

DmYGowLDgY9KNoObTv3ALnAxF0J3agbff-ZKvybcKocsgT7tYswDMgAgvHIr8fUFLfu2VNNAfSDuSBCG_

jXMyXnvuxdVv-GMs_298&_hsmi=84970497

21 https://insights.devopsinstitute.com/hubfs/Upskilling%202020/2020%20Upskilling-%20Enterprise%20

DevOps%20Skills%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=2020%20Upskilling%20Report%20-%20Promo&utm_

source=hs_automation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=84970497&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--GK0cf4KQZm_

DmYGowLDgY9KNoObTv3ALnAxF0J3agbff-ZKvybcKocsgT7tYswDMgAgvHIr8fUFLfu2VNNAfSDuSBCG_

jXMyXnvuxdVv-GMs_298&_hsmi=84970497

22 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/94percent-of-employees-would-stay-at-a-company-for-this-one-

reason.html

23 https://devops.com/got-devops-skills-a-look-at-the-upskilling-enterprise-devops-skills-report/

About the Authors

Shaaron A Alvares works as an Agile and DevOps Transformation Coach at T-Mobile, an Editor for DevOps, Culture and Methods at InfoQ and an Ambassador at DevOps Insti-tute. She led significant Lean, Agile and DevOps practice adoptions and transformations at global F500 companies such as ALCOA, Amazon.com, Expedia, Microsoft, and T-Mo-bile. She focuses on introducing customized value-driven practices aligned with organiza-tional cultural and performance goals.

Eveline Oehrlich is Chief Research Director at DevOps Institute. She conducts research on topics focusing on DevOps as well as Business and IT Automation. She held the po-sition of VP and Research Director at Forrester Research, where she led and conducted research around a variety of topics including DevOps, Digital Operational Excellence, IT and Enterprise Service Management, Cognitive Intelligence and Application Performance Management for 13 years. She has advised leaders and teams across small and large en-terprises in the world on challenges and possible changes to people, process and tech-nology. She is the author of many research papers and thought leadership pieces and a well-known presenter and speaker within the IT industry. Eveline has more than 25 years of experience in IT.

About DevOps Institute

DevOps Institute is dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps success. As a global member-based association, DevOps Institute is the go-to learning hub connecting IT practitioners, education partners, consultants, talent acquisition and business execu-tives to help pave the way to support digital transformation and the New IT.

We help advance careers and support emerging practices within the DevOps community based on a human centered SKIL Framework, consisting of Skills, Knowledge, Ideas, and Learning. All our work, including accreditations, research, events, and continuous learn-ing programs, is focused on providing the “human know-how” to modernize IT and make DevOps succeed.

Address and Other Details

Please contactoehrliche@devopsinstitute.comfor questions about this report.