The Human Side Of Organizational Velocity
Is Your Technology or Framework A Solution Looking For A Problem?
It seems that every other webinar, tweet or conference presentation you see posted over the last few months all focus on increasing the speed of value delivery. My own writings have admittedly been focused on this challenge for over the past 24 months as our industry responds to the market demand for better faster cheaper!
As usual the IT solution to this challenge is typically presented in two categories.
- Enter Stage Left: We need efficient & Integrated processes {Agile, Lean & DevOps}
- Enter Stage Right: We need better tools {Cloud Foundries, Digital Pipelines & Artificial Intelligence}
However, from where I stand the primary challenge and barrier to building the necessary velocity continues to be a people and organizational change management issue and not a process or technology problem. To point out the obvious (Elephant in the room) if you would forgive the gratuitous reference to my employer the main barriers have always been and continue to be organizational and cultural challenges related to:
- Center Stage: Leadership, Lack of Shared Goals and Silo versus Systems Thinking
In fact, as I work with various organization’s I am not seeing the promised solutions improving the velocity significantly. For some organizations they are making the problem worse as various groups adopt their own flavours of Agile practices or deploy cloud solutions and digital pipelines in pockets of the same organizations. The impact being that the silo approach to adopting these solutions in isolated pockets creates additional complexity, variability and cost. As I read about the promise of automation examples such as a cloud enabled Platform As A Service (PasS) I would expect to see operations teams setting up shared service models for each of the Product Teams to use and leverage to improve the quality, speed and cost of the organizational capability for deploying and provisioning releases. However, what I typically observe is that each product team is standing up their own private digital pipeline by product or service line! How does this achieve the goal of simplification and standardization in order to reduce technical debt?
Perhaps of all the current and emergent models DevOps hits the mark the closest with its focus on collaboration, culture and teaming. However, if you look closely at what organizations are actually doing under the banner of DevOps it is not the focus on culture and organizational issues they have picked up on, but rather a laser focus on the automation elements of continuous integration, testing and deployment. While these elements are useful, in my opinion they are not the most critical success factors for achieving the DevOps objectives.
For this reason at Pink Elephant we have developed a new course, DevOps Essentials Certification Course, with focus on the DevOps “Full Stack” (Culture, Practices and Automation)….in that order!
When it all is said and done the People, Process and Technology Tri-Factor always starts with “People”
As an executive consultant and trainer I have the privileged opportunity to work with many organizations around the world. It is my job to help organizations understand how to deliver on business and organizational objectives by levering and integrating management practices such as Lean, Agile, DevOps and ITIL®️ practices.
However, the key message that I have learned to deliver is that while these practices are useful, they provide limited value when there is a lack of leadership, shared goals and systems thinking. To that end I have over time developed a series of five questions that I believe are key to achieving organizational velocity!
- Can we agree to agree to agree? (systems vs silo thinking)
- Can we agree on one way to do something? (reduction of complexity and variability)
- Can we agree to focus on simplifying how that thing should be done? (focus on value added activities and reduction of waste)
- Can we agree to use one tool for collaboration if possible? (move to common tools for each category for improved collaboration & reduction of technical debt)
- Can we agree on an integrated solution over a best of breed point solution? (automation of delivery pipelines is enabled by systems integration)
As you read these five questions how does your organization compare?
The key of these five questions are that they are more about leadership, organizational change, people and culture than they are about technology.
Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?
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Comments
Troy,
Great article, I’m also reading up on some of your oldies that are still relevant in 2019 - https://blog.pinkelephant.com/blog/service_owner_the_missing_itsm_role. Unfortunately the answers to your five questions for most organizations are probably not where they want to be as true north is the goal but not ever completely achieved.
What is the low hanging fruit in culture change to shift from the traditional IT departmental silo thinking around operations (servers, storage, etc) to business outcome delivery (ITIL/Lean/Agile) focus? What impact does that have on organizational authority for example if it takes three traditional technology departments to delivery the service of Finance ERP to the organization does the service owner typically have full change authority for that service? Do you mostly throw out the traditional organizational hierarchical structure and align as true service teams?
Thanks,
Curtis
Curtis | January 4, 2019 at 11:24am
Hello Curtis
I agree with your statement that the answer for most organizations to the 5 questions are not very positive which is very sad. This is why I believe the DevOps focus on culture and the upcoming ITIL 4 adoption of System Thinking concepts is a critical success factor we need to focus on to get moving on these subject.
In my opinion the way forward to address this issue is the movement towards Product / Service oriented cross functional teams. This was in no way invented by the Agile / DevOps movements but has been borrowed from the Lean, Manufacturing Industry. Research around Cross Functional Team and T-Shaped / Minded individuals have been a proven counter measure to the silo cultures we see re-enforced by typical vertically oriented Org Structures.
This is a topic I have spoken on a few times and you can find some additional context at the following links
https://soundcloud.com/pe-practitioner-radio/pr-70-release-management-devops-teams
Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams within Agile & DevOps Organizations
http://go.italerting.com/cross-functional-agile-devops-teams
Troy DuMoulin, VP Research & Development | January 4, 2019 at 1:49pm