Skip to content
Home » Creating a DevOps Culture?

Creating a DevOps Culture?

A question recently arose in the excellent DORA community around changing and measuring your software development and DevOps culture.

This brought to mind many experiences around attempts by those in charge to make things better by applying initiatives which, while well-intentioned, often have the opposite effect on the more technical population of a software organisation.

A firm I was working for once, bought a pile of Accelerate and dumped them in an open locker for people to take home and read. Buying the books alone will not make your firm achieve DevOps success.

While I appreciate the efforts of those to codify or measure culture, you’re doing it wrong. Instead, read Accelerate. Read books like the Phoenix Project and the Unicorn Project in particular – to realise that applying cultural change (a cultural revolution if you will) is not possible. You need to be the revolution that you seek.

Start to put into practice the things that they preach i.e. looking at the Accelerate capabilities:

  • Continuous Delivery
  • Architecture
  • Product and Process
  • Lean management and monitoring
  • Culture

Culture – I would argue – is the most important as it will drive the other capabilities.

This means you will need to lead your organisation into an engineering success story.

You decide. You lead. And then you make it happen.