In this new age, every company is an information technology company, whether they know it yet or not.
Sooner, Safer, Happier, Jonathan Smart et al
DevOps & Agile
Why You Should Preorder “The Unicorn Project”
UPDATE: Gene Kim’s reaction added at the bottom…
Why you should preorder The Unicorn Project in four tweets. 🙂
As someone who frequently speaks publicly, I know how powerful answering “How does this apply to me?” is. If you are in IT dev or ops, you will have that answer from @RealGeneKim’s upcoming to-be classic, “The Unicorn Project.” I’d preorder it now 🙂 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QT9QR41/
@RealGeneKim Basically, in “The Phoenix Project,” Gene made Goldratt’s seminal work, “The Goal,” real 4 IT, especially on the ops side. In “The Phoenix Project,” Gene drives it home on the dev side (but not by ignoring ops). This book will be a must read for all levels, indiv contrib to exec.
@RealGeneKim Why all levels? If u r an indiv contrib u’ll see all the symptoms of the dysfunctional dev & ops illness called out, & know THERE IS A CURE!
If u r a leader (right up through exec), u’ll finally c why placebos do so little, & have a chance to prescribe the true cure as a team!
@RealGeneKim How do I know? I’ve read The Goal. I’ve read The Phoenix Project. & I was blessed 2 read an unproofed, prepub copy of The Unicorn Project. I’m already torturing my boss 2 get its ideas piloted in our dev org. 🙂
Buy the book. Torture your boss. Improve lives & the bottom line.
[Read more…] about Why You Should Preorder “The Unicorn Project”
Interview: Jack Maher and Carmen DeArdo
This past Friday, June 7, I had the honor of interviewing Jack Maher and Carmen DeArdo, coauthors of Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation (you can check out my review here).
Here is your chance to learn at the feet of a couple of masters in the leadership, Lean, and DevOps spaces. Find out who they are, what inspired them to invest the time in writing a book, the types of reactions they’ve received, what they’ve learned since that they wish they could add to its pages, and quite a bit more:
If you do get a chance to watch and/or listen, please be sure to leave comments on YouTube or this page. Your feedback is invaluable…let’s learn together!
Review: War and Peace and IT
Have you ever read a book and said to yourself, “I want to lock my executives in a room and make them read this”?
Okay, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration :-), but Mark Schwartz’s latest work is one that all levels of IT management should digest, especially executives. My copy is filled why highlights and I have pages of notes. It is near impossible to select a few points to focus on for a review, but…
- Do you want to know why it is a fundamental mistake to treat IT like a contractor versus being an equal partner in business outcomes? Read this book.
- Do you need ideas on how to align your company’s financial model with a truly agile development approach? Read this book.
- Do you want to improve outcomes, reduce costs, and turn your employees into value-generating entrepreneurs? Read this book.
In the end… [Read more…] about Review: War and Peace and IT
Counterintuitive IT™: How Do We Change Culture?
These are rough notes I put together for a ~90 minute presentation to my company’s Agile Community of Interest. I have edited them to remove any direct references to who I work for…not because you aren’t smart enough to use Google, Bing, or your favorite search engine to figure that out :-)…but because it has to be clear that I do not speak for my employer, just myself.
(If you see “our company,” or something close to it, in this post, that probably was originally the company name. “Edited” on a slide means it was adjusted to remove my employer’s name.)
There are three options to view the associated presentation: PDF, PowerPoint, and the slides embedded into this article. If you use the PowerPoint version in slideshow mode, you’ll see the cool transitions. 🙂 Please do not reuse any images unless you personally have rights to them.
Two reminders:
- I said rough notes. 🙂 I do not spend a ton of time making sure grammar, spelling, et cetera is accurate with speaking notes.
- These are my thoughts and my thoughts only, not those of the company who I am so blessed to be employed by.
Oh, one more note: I’m still new to Agile and DevOps, so I’m sure my perceptions will change. Heck, even if I was part of those powerful approaches from their foundations, my perceptions should change over time. What you read below is my best take on what I’ve learned so far. A massive thanks to all those who have helped me reach this point.
#letslearntogether [Read more…] about Counterintuitive IT™: How Do We Change Culture?
The Forgotten Contributions of Women to DevOps
Today Nicole Forsgren started an inspiring conversation on Twitter with these three tweets:
I want to do a talk: Hidden Figures of DevOps. Women’s contributions thru history. I know we’re there. I we’re erased or forgotten. Help me remember. Give me dates and names and what we did. Please RT.
— dr. nicole forsgren (@nicolefv) May 5, 2019
Example: people list dudes starting DevOps in ~2007-09(?). I started my foundational research at USENIX LISA in 2007. SODR in 2013. Not allowed to even talk about my role in SODR 2015.
I know there’s more. Let’s go!
— dr. nicole forsgren (@nicolefv) May 5, 2019
I list my example
1) because I know mine
2) because I want ladies to feel okay speaking up for themselves! This is my thread and I make the rules.Brag! If it doesn’t fit into a talk I’ll fit it into a blog post. We are amazing. 💪✨💖
— dr. nicole forsgren (@nicolefv) May 5, 2019
The huge number of responses showed great interest in documenting the forgotten contributions of women in DevOps. There were so many replies, Nicole generated a shared Google doc to make sure nothing is missed: [Read more…] about The Forgotten Contributions of Women to DevOps
Review: Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Tranformation
Since I stepped more into the Agile and DevOps world, I’ve been blessed by getting to meet and/or talk to some great people, including authors of books everyone should read. Now, I have not met Carmen DeArdo in person yet, but I have spoken with him a couple times (and exchanged e-mails), so I was excited to find out he and Jack Maher came out with Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation.
I think with this review I am going to start rating books 5 (high) to 1 (low):
5 – Pay for both the electronic and paper versions
4 – Pay for the electronic or paper version (whichever is your preference)
3 – Pay for it if it is heavily discounted
2 – Read it if it is free
1 – Unless you need a cure for insomnia, skip it
Based on what I actually did, Standing on Shoulders is a 5. 🙂
Why? I’ll provide three major reasons… [Read more…] about Review: Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Tranformation
This Is Now Your Company
I have been so busy rebuilding my home office with a Human Solution UPLIFT Desk (more on that another day), I have been remiss in not noting how much I enjoyed a presentation by Mike Rognlien at a morning VitalSmarts conference last Thursday. Considering how much I am highlighting passages, his book, This Is Now Your Company, is going on my DevOps & Agile Book Club book list!
DevOps & Agile Book Club
After church and lunch at IHOP, I spent the rest of the afternoon creating a Microsoft Teams team (with channels) for a new DevOps & Agile Book Club at work. One of the things I love about both DevOps and Agile is the complete commitment to continual learning. Reading is one of the best ways to do that in my opinion.
I did a decent amount of on-line research to prep creating the club, but do you have pointers to good examples of book clubs (or personal experience with them)? Specifically DevOps and/or Agile ones? Any books we just must have on our list?
I can especially use ideas for a virtual book club (we cannot all meet together in person).
Thanks ahead of time for your wisdom!
Counterintuitive IT™ (Part 1)
Intuition is a handy thing to have in IT. As a former IT Jack-of-all-trades, I could join an outage call and frequently identify what was wrong more quickly than the experts. As a newbie with DevOps, data science, and other emerging IT fields, I don’t have that advantage anymore. It is uncomfortable.
But, it is exciting.
That does not mean I am entirely bereft of intuition in these new areas. Logic is logic, regardless of subject. However, it is invigorating to discover new, Counterintuitive IT™ facts or assertions. This is the first in an ongoing series of posts where I will share Counterintuitive IT™ examples as I run into them.
Counterintuitive IT™ #1: CABs Don’t Help, They Hinder
Having spent too much time on outage calls, I can appreciate any effort to reduce change induced incidents (CIIs). Avoiding those is especially important in healthcare IT (my present career). At a minimum, we inconvenience our clinicians and/or patients. Worst case, it impacts patient safety.
One popular approach to minimize CIIs is to require all non-standard, non-emergency modifications of production systems go before a change approval board (CAB). Having multiple sets of eyes will ensure you have all your ducks in a row, significantly reducing the likelihood of a problem.