Management
Once upon a time we categorized companies into two broad categories with regards to decision making: Centralized & De-centralized. This model is easy to comprehend when we think of a central headquarters housing centralized functions and executives, and then a large number of branches which service local regions. A bank or retail operation is a common example. Thinking on the subject seems non-applicable to companies that lack this distribu...
DevOps has often been criticized for drawing too strongly from manufacturing metaphors. SRE, DevOps, NoOps, we quibble over words. What is DevOps? We scratch at definitions to explain it. I think the time has come for the confusion to end and for us all to accept the reality: we have entered a new age, the information age. e-Commerce, e-Government, everything has changed as we've evolved with the coming of the internet. We ...
How does one govern an organization? The word govern derives from the Greek word to steer. Today we commonly prefer to say "manage", but manage has a more active and direct connotation. How does one steer an organization? Steven Blank says that there are 3 phases to an organization: the search phase, the build phase, the execution phase. While strictly speaking each of these phases could be of any size, we most commonly see ...
I recently competed a research binge, the purpose of which was to better understand the life cycle of companies. I started by converging all my past experiences with startups together (written out long form) and then posited some hypothesis about my experiences and the experiences of those I'd talked to first hand. Then I started asking questions and researching each topic. This study included small but important definition questions, such ...
Since before the beginnings of the word "DevOps" many of us have tried to create an adaptation of the Agile Manifesto specific to Operations. All attempts failed. It is now apparent to me that they failed because DevOps was all together a more complex phenomenon than any of us realized at the time. While it is true that we were trying to transform the way Development and Operations had occurred in the past, we were in very green territory, ...
Many people believe that traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) and DevOps are incompatible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most frameworks and standards for governance and security such as COBIT5, ITILv3, CMMI-SVC, ISO27K, etc, are treasure troves of good ideas. The reason there is such tension between these two camps lies not in the words but rather in the perspectives of the reader. Our perspectives are rooted in our core ...
In the LEAN and DevOps worlds we're obsessed with the idea of providing value. But what is value really? Some times we use a word so much that it is drained of any practical meaning and becomes more of an abstract idea. It may not be too much of a stretch to say that the word "value" ceases to really contain any value. Webster defines "value" as: "a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged" "the ...
Within an ops team you should have 3 primary types of governance enablers: controls, policies and processes. A control is a guiding principle, which is implemented as a one or more policies (which are just rules), which are in turn standardized in a set of procedures. Its important to have all 3, because controls are very vague, policies are often general and broad in nature, which means to provide consistent quality results we require ...
I'm highly introspective... far more than I would actually like to be. I'm one of those strange individuals to whom if you said "Do you realize your being a jerk right now?" I'd actually admit "Yes, I'm sorry about that, I'm trying to find a way to rectify it unsuccessfully." Despite that obsessive level of awareness, nothing can tell you more about who you are then your children. In particular, by observing things your children do that ...
Last week I was given the incredible opportunity to not only speak at LISA but to deliver the opening keynote. I hadn't expected to even go, but when I learned the topic was DevOps I made a last minute plea on the eve of the submission deadline for a slot to deliver a talk I was calling "The 60 Minute MBA", a history of Operations Management. My hope is that I could get some obscure timeslot so a handful of people could geek out with me on ...