InfoQ: In the report it is called out that "a successful DevOps journey has the DNA of a learning organization". What are some of the ways this learning culture manifests within successful organizations?
Eveline Oerhlich: According to Peter Senge (Fifth Discipline, 1990) learning organizations are … organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.
This is manifested in 4 different ways:
Continually expanding their capacity to create results: By bringing together Dev and Ops (and a variety of other SMEs to form a multidisciplinary team) each team member adds their own expertise and experience to achieve results. Additionally, the first way of DevOps is enabling fast flow from left to right (dev to operations to deliver value to customers quickly) by increasing flow and making work visible, allowing the reduction of bottlenecks and the avoidance of bouncing
things among team members back and forth. We want to ensure we see where work isflowing (Kanban helps with this) and part of the feedback loops help to continually expand capacity to create the results.
New and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured: We see the adoption of a safety culture, where people are encouraged to learn from mistakes and leaders do not punish, which allows for
experimentation and trial and error.
Topics such as chaos engineering(creating chaos within the production environment to understand and fix what goes wrong) is one extreme example of this.
Collective aspiration is set free: same as the above plus bringing creativity and multi-disciplinary approaches together.
See the whole together: The second way of DevOps is including the feedback and feedforward loops where knowledge and information is moved from right (Ops) to left (Dev) or the other way around. This prevents problems from progressing downstream. In manufacturing this methodology was the Andon Cord where workers could pull a cord to stop
These challenges include an inability to secure and develop the right talent, an aversion to risk-taking and idea generation, and a fixation on past failures. The report highlighted the human skills to focus on to prepare existing staff for a successful DevOps transformation.