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Classic Metrics for How Good You Are
One of the ‘best metrics ever’ is the classic “bus number”. This measures how many people in an organization can be hit by a bus before that organization’s operations or progress is severely hindered...
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Start Collaboration with Teaching
Every technology organization should force everyone in the group to regularly educate the group on what they are doing. This should be a cross-discipline activity – not a departmental activity. There...
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Leaders Should Make Their Teams Teach
Teaching something will make you a better practitioner of that thing. It is an adjunct to the old adage that true mastery of a subject is the ability to teach it to someone else. The act of educating...
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Rise of the DOMO
A lot of the DevOps conversations I have had lately have been around organization issues and what to do about the artificial barriers and silos that exist in most shops. Interestingly there is a...
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How a DOMO Fits
In my previous post, I discussed the notion of a DevOps Management Organization or DOMO. As I said there, this is and idea that is showing up under different names at shops of varying sizes. I...
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Rollback Addiction
A lot of teams are fascinated with the notion of ‘rollback’ in their environments. They seem to be addicted to its seductive conceptual simplicity. It does, of course, have valid uses, but, like a...
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How Fast Should You Change the Tires?
I am an unabashed car nut and like to watch a variety of motor racing series. In particular I tend to stay focused on Formula 1 with a secondary interest in the endurance series (e.g Le Mans). In...
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A System for Changing Systems – Part 1 – Approach
This is the first post in a series which will look at common patterns among DevOps environments. Based on these patterns, they will attempt to put a reasonable structure together that will help...
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A System for Changing Systems – Part 3 – How Many “Chang-ee”s
As mentioned in the last post, once there is a “whole system” understanding of an application system, the next problem is that there are really multiple variants of that system running within the...
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Ops Heroes are NOT Qualified to do Anything with Nothing
There is a certain “long-suffering and misunderstood” attitude that shows up a lot in Operations. I have seen this quote on a number of cube walls: We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the...
View ArticleYour Deployment Doc Might Not be Useful for DevOps
One of the most common mistakes I see people making with automation is the assumption that they can simply wrap scripts around what they are doing today and be ‘automated’. The assumption is based...
View ArticleOld Habits Make DevOps Transformation Hard
My father is a computer guy. Mainframes and all of the technologies that were cool a few decades ago. I have early memories of playing with fascinating electro-mechanical stuff at Dad’s office and its...
View ArticlePredictability is Predictably Hard
In order to successfully automate something, the pieces being automated have to be ‘predictable’. I use ‘predictable’ here – rather than ‘consistent’ – deliberately. A ‘predictable’ environment means...
View ArticleManagement, Leadership, Continuous Improvement, and DevOps
There is a management aphorism that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” That gets attributed to Peter Drucker, though it is not actually what he said. What he said was “If you can’t measure...
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