Developing the DevOps Mindset
By: Keith Blizard
Tags: DevOps, Strategy, Cloud, Fidelity Investments

How does a DevOps mindset help drive the transformation change your business demands? DevOps is all about shortening the development life cycle to provide the continuous delivery of high quality software and today, technologists have every capability at their fingertips! They can build and deliver ideas and innovation with only their imaginations as their constraint. So, the question comes to mind, ‘How do leaders support transformation, at scale, with desired velocity, while incorporating a self-service model to support enablement?’

As leaders, we are focused on supporting, enabling, and maximizing the value produced by our talented engineering teams. Maximizing value is not just about deploying cool technology, but about creating business value from innovation and delivering it to our customers.

It’s also about building a team and a culture that embraces a DevOps mindset — a mindset to drive automation and accountability. This approach enables teams to increase their ownership in the products and services they create, and ultimately enables our engineering talent to have meaningful careers.

Here are a few pieces of advice to help smooth your DevOps journey:

The ‘why’ alignment — paint the picture

Building a strategic intent would be one of the first items on your to-do list. The ability to paint the future picture of the transformation you are embarking upon is an exciting and positive message for those creating it.

The problem now is how to share it. How will people get behind the core changes you are looking to make? I always recommend starting with the ‘why.’ Most people, especially in technology roles, focus on the what and how — and there can be debate (sometimes a lot of debate) on those pieces. The why will allow you to ground the messages into something firm and ensure the efforts are positioning to that overall goal. Some great books like “Metrics that Matter” are a great read to help you get started.

Manage your team’s WIP — pick three

You have amazing ideas and passion for change — so you wonder why managing your work intake is important? During transformations, it is a common task when the leader or leadership team create long lists of improvements and changes. That is a great practice to be added to your backlog.

What I recommend to leaders is to share only a few — only three at any point in time. This allows your team to internalize the key message and build the reinforcement in the ‘why.’ If you have too many items being done at once, people will not remember them and most importantly not be able to make the connection with the ‘why.’

Remove today’s limitations — don’t get stuck in the present

Driving into the unknown is a scary but exciting path. During your transformation, don’t limit yourself in your approach. Too many enterprises have failed on their cloud and digital journey just for this reason — they refuse to let go of the process in place for years (and sometimes decades.)

DevOps success is based on continuous improvement of the whole team over time. Each person will undertake the journey on their own. Your job as the leader is to create the strategic intent for the program, amplify the successes and remove blockers that get in the way. This will be a struggle for micro-managers or people who want to be the smartest person in the room. Leaders that focus on the player/coach style will flourish.

Focus on the customer — what are you doing for them?

I can’t think of many projects that ever went well when the customer was not at the epicenter of importance. There is nothing worse than watching presentations where the IT team highlights success and goals, and you see the customer actually not care about them.

Building that customer mindfulness is hard in IT, especially in common Enterprise IT functions, but that is what is needed for transformation.

There are many different approaches, and the one that I enjoyed the most has been implementing ‘Service Recovery Paradox’ as a core principle in the transformation. In IT, we are there to solve and service people, and it’s our overall responsibility when negative interaction occurs. How you show up during that bad time will directly impact the perception you have with your customers. There are great materials available on use cases and examples, but having this as a principle will create empathy within your team, and ensure you are always focusing on what is important — the customers you work for.

Embrace self-service — remove constraints and silos

Self-service is one of the keys to driving value. At Fidelity, our goal is to provide access to everything a developer needs to get going within one hour. We want our engineers to innovate and build and deploy really fast. Self-service, by pushing the accountability to the edge, makes that happen, and keeps developers happy and productive.

Inspiration through excitement — be the positive change

I believe people do not follow titles, but they follow leaders; and people love working for leaders who aspire, motivate and remain positively connected to the vision you establish. This comes into play during failures more than successes. Failure is an opportunity to innovate, not to blame. This is a key improvement for many leaders, and is critical for teams to feel safe, have the autonomy for them to drive needed change, and drive the transparency of the actual work.

Building your DevOps mindset leads to an amazing professional and personal transformation. I get motivated in my day to day life when teams and individuals adopt these core components. Keep on learning, improving, and driving the change you want to lead.

“Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future” ~ John F. Kennedy

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