The DevOps movement emphasizes the importance of culture in creating high-performing teams. However, often perceived to be subjective and intractable, culture is often neglected in favor of more concrete drivers such as tools and processes. And this is a major failure mode in organizations attempting to achieve substantially improved performance through implementing agile and DevOps. Jez Humble takes a practical, data-driven approach to culture, illustrated with examples from large, successful enterprises. Learn how to measure culture and examine what a generative, high-performance culture looks like. Explore how to change organizational culture, and discover how high-performing organizations use the patterns and practices of continuous delivery and lean management to outcompete their peers. Jez concludes by presenting the principles behind successful organizational change―and how to make your changes stick.

1. K1
Keynote
6/8/16 8:30 AM
“DevOps and the Culture of High-
Performing Software Organizations”
Presented by:
Jez Humble
Jez Humble & Associates LLC
Brought to you by:
350 Corporate Way, Suite 400, Orange Park, FL 32073
888---268---8770 ·· 904---278---0524 - info@techwell.com - http://www.techwell.com/

2. Jez Humble
Jez Humble & Associates LLC
Jez Humble is co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published
in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010), and Lean Enterprise,
in Eric Ries’ Lean series (O'Reilly, 2015). He has consulted for many Global 500
companies to help them achieve technical excellence and deploy a culture of
experimentation and learning. His focus is on helping organizations discover and
deliver valuable, high-quality products. He teaches at UC Berkeley.

3. high performance product development
@jezhumble
#devopswest| 7 june 2016
afternoon agenda
the product lifecycle
productivity at scale
experimental product development
the culture of high performance

4. high performance product development:
the product lifecycle

5. lifecycle of innovations
technology adoption lifecycle
Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

6. three horizons
Baghai, M., Coley, S. and White, D., The Alchemy of Growth
Intuit horizons and metrics

7. explore vs exploit
product/market fit
MOST IDEAS
FAIL!

8. optionality
Nassim Taleb, Antifrafile
A startup is a human
institution designed to create
new products and services
under conditions of extreme
uncertainty
eric ries, the lean startup, ch.
1

9. learn: create a value hypothesis
build: gather the necessary data
measure: how do we test our hypothesis?
learn-measure-build
vanity vs actionable metrics

10. high performance product development:
productivity at scale
“the enterprise”
Project A
Project B
Project C
DBAs
Infrastructure team
Service desk
Value stream
OperationsEngineeringBusiness
Ping!

11. Project A
Project B
Project C
DBAs
Infrastructure team
Service desk
Value stream
OperationsEngineeringBusiness
Ping!
Project D
Let’s create
a new
product
enterprise projects
Project A
Project B
DBAs
Infrastructure team
Service desk
Project D
We’re
going agile! Oh no!Oh no!
Value stream
OperationsEngineeringBusiness

12. Project A
Project B
DBAs
Infrastructure team
Service desk
Value stream
OperationsEngineeringBusiness
Project D
Our test-driven code
follows SOLID
principles
Shame it
doesn’t work
Change
management
enterprise agility
“The main obstacles to improved
business responsiveness are slow
decision-making, conflicting
departmental goals and priorities, risk-
averse cultures and silo-based
information.”
Economist Intelligence Unit: “Organisational agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times”

13. The Alignment Trap
“Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT,“ David Shpilberg, Steve Berez, Rudy Puryear and Sachin Shah
MIT Sloan Management Review Magazine, Fall 2007.
iron triangle

14. IT is a Competitive Advantage
“Firms with high-
performing IT organizations
were twice as likely to
exceed their profitability,
market share and
productivity goals.”
http://bit.ly/2014-devops-report
time to restore service
lead time for changes
release frequency
change fail rate
it performance
http://bit.ly/2014-devops-report

15. highest correlation with it performance
• “Our code, app configurations and system
configurations are in a version control system”
• “We get failure alerts from logging and
monitoring systems”
• “Developers merge their code into trunk daily”
• “When development and operations teams
interact, the outcome is generally win/win.”
• “Developers break up large features into small,
incremental changes.”
http://bit.ly/2014-devops-report
proactive monitoring
peer-reviewed change approval process
version control everything
win-win relationship between dev and ops
high trust organizational culture
top predictors of it performance
http://bit.ly/2014-devops-report

16. scrum-
fall
water-
Jon Jenkins, “Velocity Culture, The Unmet Challenge in Ops” | http://bit.ly/1vJo1Ya

17. hp laserjet firmware division
2008
~5% - innovation capacity
15% - manual testing
25% - product support
25% - porting code
20% - detailed planning
10% - code integration
Costs
Full manual regression: 6 wks
Builds / day: 1-2
Commit to trunk: 1 week
Cycle times
deployment pipeline

18. hp laserjet firmware team
~5% - innovation
15% - manual testing
25% - current product support
25% - porting code
20% - detailed planning
10% - code integration
2008
~40% - innovation
5% - most testing automated
10% - one branch cpe
15% - one main branch
5% - agile planning
2% - continuous integration
2011
The remaining 23% on RHS is spent on managing automated tests.
the economics
2008 to 2011
•overall development costs reduced by ~40%
•programs under development increased by ~140%
•development costs per program down 78%
•resources now driving innovation increased by 8X
A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development - Gruver, Young, Fulghum

19. high performance product development
experimental product development
batching up work
“Black Swan Farming using Cost of Delay” | Joshua J. Arnold and Özlem Yüce | bit.ly/black-swan-farming

20. create feedback loops to validate assumptions
don’t optimize for the case where we are right
focus on value, not cost
enable an experimental approach to product dev
make it economic to work in small batches
what should we do
impact mapping
Gojko Adzic, Impact Mapping

21. @jezhumbleJeff Gothelf “Better product definition with Lean UX and Design” http://bit.ly/TylT6A
hypothesis-driven delivery
We believe that
[building this feature]
[for these people]
will achieve [this outcome].
We will know we are successful when we see
[this signal from the market].
experiments
Different types of user research, courtesy of Janice Fraser

22. “Etsy’s Product Development with Continuous Experimentation”
Frank Harris and Nellwyn Thomas | http://bit.ly/19Z5izI
“Etsy’s Product Development with Continuous Experimentation”
Frank Harris and Nellwyn Thomas | http://bit.ly/19Z5izI

23. “Etsy’s Product Development with Continuous Experimentation”
Frank Harris and Nellwyn Thomas | http://bit.ly/19Z5izI
do less
“Evaluating well-designed and
executed experiments that were
designed to improve a key metric, only
about 1/3 were successful at
improving the key metric!”
“Online Experimentation at Microsoft”, Kohavi et al http://stanford.io/130uW6X

24. Jon Jenkins, “Velocity Culture, The Unmet Challenge in Ops” | http://bit.ly/1vJo1Ya
high performance product development:
the culture of high performance

25. What obstacles are preventing you from reaching
it? which one are you addressing now?
What is the target condition? (The challenge)
What is the actual condition now?
When can we go and see what we learned from
taking that step?
What is your next step? (Start of PDCA cycle)
improvement kata

26. improvement kata
A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development - Gruver, Young, Fulghum
lightweight planning
A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development - Gruver, Young, Fulghum

27. What Is Culture?
“A pattern of shared tacit assumptions that was
learned by a group as it solved its problems of
external adaptation and internal integration,
that has worked well enough to be
considered valid and, therefore, to be taught
to new members as the correct way to perceive,
think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
— Edgar Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide
What Is Culture?
“Our true culture is made primarily
of the things no one will say... Culture is about
power dynamics, unspoken
priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts,
enforcement of social norms, creation of in/
out groups and distribution of wealth and
control inside companies.”
— Shanley Kane | @shanley | Your Startup Is Broken: Inside the Toxic Heart of Tech Culture

28. “My job makes good use of my skills and abilities.”
“I would recommend this organization as a good
place to work.”
“I am satisfied with my job.”
“We use data from app perf & infra monitoring tools
to make business decisions daily.”
“I have the tools and resources to do my job well.”
Top Predictors of Org Perf
High Trust Culture
Westrum, “A Typology of Organizational Cultures” | http://bmj.co/1BRGh5q
How organizations process information

29. @jezhumble
changing culture
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-change-a-culture-lessons-from-nummi/
Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide
the production line
http://www.flickr.com/photos/toyotauk/4711057997/

30. TOYODA AUTOMATIC
LOOM TYPE G
55
“Since the loom stopped when a
problem arose, no defective
products were produced. This
meant that a single operator could
be put in charge of numerous
looms, resulting in a tremendous
improvement in productivity.”
http://www.toyota-global.com/company/vision_philosophy/toyota_production_system/jidoka.html
Ask: how can we get people
better information?
In a complex, adaptive system failure is inevitable
When accidents happen, human factors are the
starting point of a blameless post-mortem
Ask: how can we detect and limit
failure modes?
Dealing with Failure

31. Retrospective Prime Directive
“Regardless of what we discover, we
understand and truly believe that everyone did
the best job they could, given what they knew at
the time, their skills and abilities, the resources
available, and the situation at hand.”
— Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews
innovation culture
“I think building this culture is the key to
innovation. Creativity must flow from everywhere.
Whether you are a summer intern or the CTO, any
good idea must be able to seek an objective test,
preferably a test that exposes the idea to real
customers. Everyone must be able to experiment,
learn, and iterate.”
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/04/early-amazon-shopping-cart.html

32. want to learn more?
To receive the following:
• An exclusive invite to our DevOps benchmarking tool
• A chance to get a personalized analysis of your results
• A copy of this presentation
• A 100 page excerpt from Lean Enterprise
• A 20m preview of my Continuous Delivery video workshop
• Discount code for CD video + interviews with Eric Ries & more
• Early drafts of the DevOps Handbook
Just pick up your phone and send an email
To: jezhumble@sendyourslides.com
Subject: devops
© 2015-6 Jez Humble & Associates LLC