DevOps Challenges and Overcoming Blockers

On thing that comes to mind from this was how at the enterprise where I worked through their transition to devops it became pretty clear that a big part of their strategy involved not being afraid to crack some eggs in order to move the ball forward. 

The company had developed some really business-hostile patterns in some parts of their IT org.  If you wanted a new VM allocated we were looking at months of requesting approvals and hand built process and red tape and a certain amount of kingdom building where departments would sand bag and block efficient automations because they didnt want to lose head count. Sometimes people in big IT orgs can forget that the purpose of all those datacenters and racks of computers is to help the business get things done faster, and if you aren't doing that then they won't need you around. Our leadership was taking advantage of their migration to cloud and devops practices as a cover as they cleaned house on all their most obstinate, thorny IT people and it didn't take long before people understood that just saying "No" to everything wasn't going to be a viable career path anymore.  A fundamental aspect of doing devops right is that it is a continuous loop with feedback and process improvement, you won't get far without a collaborative growth mindset.  Initially it spooked a lot of people and caused a good deal of staff changes, but after about 2 years they had cleared the way forward and operations were really dramatically improved.

On thing that comes to mind from this was how at the enterprise where I worked through their transition to devops it became pretty clear that a big part of their strategy involved not being afraid to crack some eggs in order to move the ball forward. 

The company had developed some really business-hostile patterns in some parts of their IT org.  If you wanted a new VM allocated we were looking at months of requesting approvals and hand built process and red tape and a certain amount of kingdom building where departments would sand bag and block efficient automations because they didnt want to lose head count. Sometimes people in big IT orgs can forget that the purpose of all those datacenters and racks of computers is to help the business get things done faster, and if you aren't doing that then they won't need you around. Our leadership was taking advantage of their migration to cloud and devops practices as a cover as they cleaned house on all their most obstinate, thorny IT people and it didn't take long before people understood that just saying "No" to everything wasn't going to be a viable career path anymore.  A fundamental aspect of doing devops right is that it is a continuous loop with feedback and process improvement, you won't get far without a collaborative growth mindset.  Initially it spooked a lot of people and caused a good deal of staff changes, but after about 2 years they had cleared the way forward and operations were really dramatically improved.