PPT is an important word in any organization. Wait! We are not talking about Powerpoint Presentation. Here, we are focusing on people, processes, and tools/technology. Let's understand why and how they are important in changing the culture of any organization.
Importance of PPT - people, process, and technology
People
As per the famous quote from Jack Canfield :
Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.
A curious question could be, why do people matter? If we try to answer this in one sentence, then it would be: Because we are trying to change culture.
So?
People are an important part of any culture and only people can drive the change or change themselves to adapt to new processes or define new processes and learn new tools or technologies.
Let's understand how and why with the Formula for Change.
David Gleicher created the Formula for Change in the early 1960s, as per references available in Wikipedia. Kathie Dannemiller refined it in 1980. This formula provides a model to assess the relative strengths affecting the possible success of organizational change initiatives.
Gleicher (original) version: C = (ABD) > X, where: C = change, A = the status quo dissatisfaction, B = a desired clear state, D = is practical steps to the desired state, X = the cost of the change.
Dannemiller version: D x V x F > R; where D, V, and F must be present for organizational change to take place where: D = Dissatisfaction with how things are now, V = Vision of what is possible, F = First concrete steps that can be taken toward the vision. If the product of these three factors is greater than R = Resistance, then change is possible.
Essentially, it implies that there has to be strong dissatisfaction with existing things or processes, vision of what is possible with new trends, technologies, and innovations with respect to the market scenario; concrete steps that can be taken toward achieving the vision.
For more details on Formula for Change, you can visit this wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_for_change#cite_note-myth-1
If it comes to sharing an experience, I would say it is very important to train people to adopt a new culture. It is a game of patience. We can't change the mindset of people overnight and we need to understand first before changing the culture.
Often, it is observed in the industry, that job opening with a DevOps knowledge or DevOps engineers, but ideally they should not be imported and people should instead be trained in the existing environment by changing things gradually to manage resistance. We don't need a special DevOps team; we need more communication and collaboration between developers, test teams, automation enablers, and the cloud or infrastructure team.
It is essential for all to understand the pain points of each other. In the organizations I have worked, we used to have a Center of Excellence (COE) in place to manage new technologies, innovations, or culture. As an automation enabler and part of the DevOps team, we should be working as a facilitator only and not a part of the silo.
Processes
Here is a famous quote from Tom Peters, which says:
Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures
Quality is extremely important when we are dealing with evolving a culture. We need processes and policies for doing things in a proper way and standardized across the projects so the sequence of operations, constraints, rules and so on are well defined to measure success.
We need to set processes for the following things:
- Agile planning
- Resource planning and provisioning
- Configuration management
- Role-based access control to cloud resources and other tools used in automation
- Static code analysis – rules for programming languages
- Testing methodology and tools
- Release management
These processes are also important for measuring success in the process of evolving DevOps culture.
Technology
Here is a famous quote from Steve Jobs, which says:
Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.
Technology helps people and organizations to bring creativity and innovations while changing the culture. Without technology, it is difficult to achieve speed and effectiveness in the daily and routine automation operations. Cloud computing, configuration management tools, and the build pipeline are among a few that are useful in resource provisioning, installing a runtime environment, and orchestration. Essentially, it helps to speed up different aspects of application life cycle management.