100 Ideas to bring DevOps into an Organization
- Coding
- Compensation
- Communication
- Confidence
- Continous learning, experimenting
- Cost reduction
- Cultural Change
- Culture
- Decision Making
- Discipline
- Empowerment
- Hiring
- HR
- IaC
- Incentivize Responsibility
- Lean
- Learning
- Managing Trade-offs
- Organization
- Organizational Change
- Outsourcing
- Process
- Reliability
- Security
- Self-service
- Simplification
- Skills
- Success
- Value
ID | Idea | Category |
---|---|---|
1 | Provide unlimited access to online trainings to your employees | HR; Learning; Skills |
2 | Transfer HR and finance from departments into chapters embedded in the different teams | Organizational Change |
3 | Let dev lives the life of ops for a while and vice | Cultural Change |
4 | Let a young promising employee mentor management on new technologies or simply usage of technologies | Cultural Change |
5 | Ask a venture capital firm to listen to the pitch of your senior management trying to virtually sell their department | Cultural Change; Value; |
6 | Give credits on public clouds to any of your IT colleagues | Continous learning, experimenting |
7 | Target the shutdown your email server to be replaced by more modern communication means | Cultural Change |
8 | Use Markdown as your default format for documents (blogs, minutes, user stories, documentation) and git as your way to track history and to collaborate. | Cultural Change |
9 | All IT staff members have at least minimum shell script skills | Skills; HR; Hiring |
10 | Teach IT staff members a programming language requiring a minimalist development environment like javascript, python, go, vb. | Skills; HR; Hiring |
11 | Provide a command line tool to report time instead of a web UI | Cultural Change |
12 | Teach everybody hacking techniques: social engineering, phishing, password cracking to improve the security on all the systems in the company | Security; Cultural Change |
13 | Encourage people to get interviews at software-centric companies so that they understand their expectations | HR; Hiring; Cultural Change |
14 | Establish agreements with public cloud firms. They can have their employees as intern in your company and vice | Skills; Cultural Change |
15 | Train everyone on simple IT topics and get rid of the IT hotline | Skills; Cost reduction; Self-service |
16 | Have an exponential complexity to obtain budget when the budget requested gets bigger. Low budget, no question. | Decision Making; Cultural Change |
17 | Set lower salary ranges to managers than to technical experts | HR; Compensation |
18 | What if the intranet makes it ultra simple to give credit to somebody that teaches you something and that these credits result in the transfer of bonus from one employee to the other. | Compensation; Cultural Change |
19 | What if co-opting recognized talent brings a lot of money to the person hiring the talent? | HR; Compensation |
20 | Hire with very clear objectives for the first 6 months and schedule monthly review meetings and yearly goals | HR; Skills; Learning |
21 | Announce prizes for simplification or automation of processes | Simplification; Compensation |
22 | Set financial incentives for objectives achieved in less time than planned | Compensation; Cultural Change |
23 | Ops will only get their bonus only if they achieve their SLA with a 0.02% delta: 99.9%+ 0.02%. | Compensation |
24 | Create financial benefits for all staff involved in running a service | Incentivize Responsibility |
25 | Ask IT managers to reduce cost by 20% and to cut release cycles into half every quarter | Managing Trade-offs; Cost reduction |
26 | So you did not have a single outage in the last month! Restart production now. | Cultural Change |
27 | Everybody must do oncall rotations, it's free money anyways. | Compensaton; Incentivize Responsibility |
28 | Make on-call voluntary. If you don't have a hard time finding engineers. Your must have reliable system. | Cultural Change; Incentivize Responsibility |
29 | Make on-call voluntary. If you don't have a hard time finding engineers, then your DevOps maturity is high. | Incentivize Responsibility |
30 | Stop feature development, if your engineers do not create code for more than 50% of their time. | Cultural Change |
31 | If you are having a DevOps Team, you're doing it wrong. | Culture |
32 | If all of your development is done externally, you're doing it wrong. | Outsourcing |
33 | If you are outsourcing on-call, you're doing it wrong. | Outsourcing |
34 | Teach your developers when to enable "bullshit mode". | Culture; Communication; Empowerment; Learning |
35 | Fight the "I used to be a developer syndrom" | Culture; Coding |
36 | Every manager should be able to push code into production | Coding; Confidence; Empowerment |
37 | Let senior management roll-out features by the push of physical button! | Confidence; Empowerment |
38 | Remove "hand-over" from the dictionary. | Culture; Outsourcing; |
39 | Every time someone says "hand-over" have him pay the next cradle of beer. | Culture |
40 | Every time someone says "let me ssh into ..." have pay the next cradle of beer. | Confidence; Security; |
41 | Implement approval workflow for ssh access, make it complicated to use and track frequency of use. | Cultural change; Discipline |
42 | I’m going to delete 10 lines of code from your project and if the build is green, we deploy! | Confidence |
43 | What if we put the data into the cloud first? | Culture; Outsourcing |
44 | Automating triggers is as important as automating processes | Self-service; Discipline |
45 | If you are managing software projects like any other project, you're doing it wrong! | Discipline; Organization; Process |
46 | You can't steer, if you are not moving | Culture; Process |
47 | Open up APIs for all internal systems (PPM, Finance, ...) | Simplification; Cultural Change |
48 | A new developer should deploy to production on his first day. | Success |
49 | If you run unicorn sprints frequently, rethink your DevOps approach | Success |
50 | In a mature DevOps culture, there should be no unicorn sprints | Success |
51 | The amount of tickets that you need to file to run your service, is inversionally proportional to your DevOps maturity | Self-service; Simplification |
52 | The amount of emails and people on cc that you need to send to run your service, is inversionaly propotional to your level of DevOps maturity | Self-service; Simplification |
53 | The amount of people that you need to speak to to run to run your service, is inversionaly propotional to your level of DevOps maturity | Self-service; Simplification |
54 | Put trust on the developers you have, and they will create great things | Empowerment |
55 | Software development is chaotic, follow the discipline but be ready to embrace chaos | Empowerment |
56 | Communication is terrible, keep the teams small | Simplification; Organization |
57 | Everybody is responsible end to end of their change | Culture |
58 | The reviewer should be able to deploy reviewee's code | Simplification; Confidence |
59 | UI configurations are the evil | IaC |
60 | Stay away of old IT if you can, don't try to change it | Confidence |
61 | Developers should be interviewed by technical people | HR; Hiring |
62 | Staff teams so they can be responsible end-2-end | Process; Organization |
63 | Success of an application should be measured by customer adoption | Process; Success |
64 | It's not a problem if production fails, it's a problem when you did not notice production is failing. | Reliabilty |
65 | If writing unit tests for your work is hard, maybe your code is difficult to understand | Skills; Coding |
66 | IT managers should have technical experience | Managing Trade-offs; Skills |
67 | Non IT managers should trust IT managers technical decisions | Managing Trade-offs |
68 | IT managers should understand business goals and make a good choice understanding the different trade-offs | Managing Trade-offs |
69 | External partners should have an "open source mind" | Outsourcing |
70 | External partners should be able to provide consultants as interns for your company when required | Outsourcing |
71 | External partners should have a flexible pricing plan | Outsourcing |
72 | You will never get a product with quality, functionality and on time: you have to choose two | Decision Making |
73 | Reinforce your arguments with data and working prototypes | Communication; Simplification; Value |
74 | Ask forgiveness instead of permission, when strictly necessary | Decision Making; Managing Trade-offs |
75 | Non technical managers are smart, they just need to have a high level explanation | Communication |
76 | Whenever conflict might arise, set up a robot to handle it. People can't argue with robots | Process |
77 | Building trust should be your top priority | Cultural Change |
78 | If a colleague made a mistake, blame the process, and fix it so it won't happen again | Culture; Learning |
79 | Version control everything | Coding |
80 | Discipline should enable flexibility, not the other way around | Discipline |
81 | Treat errors in your monitoring system like production outages. | Reliability |
82 | ....value developer velocity.... | Process |
83 | Development, staging, or test are like production, don't give your developers access to these systems. | Discipline |
84 | Record and meter ssh-access, put incentives to lower the total login count. | Compensation; Cultural Change |
85 | You don't do DevOps to reduce cost in the first place. | Cultural Change |
86 | Code that is not in production is a liability | Lean |
87 | Manage a top ten list of long running systems, put it on a big screen, call it wall of shame. | Culture; Discipline |
88 | Make everything a software problem. | Coding; Culture |
89 | Instead of wasting time and resources fighting the inevitable, empower developers and reap the rewards. | Hiring; HR |
90 | Why don't we start with the data? | Culture |
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