Stop thinking DevOps is just for your tech teams | Jess Fraser Darling

Hi guys how do we make sure that we make this something that people all across the business can understand devops is not just for the people sat in an engineering role or sat in a technical team or sat in it as we know it today but what we hear about when we talk about devops and what people talk to our sea Suite about is the promised land and all they do is give these on liners of you know we want to do higher quality products and we want to be quicker at getting to the market we want to work better together and those things are all really obvious and of course everyone wants to buy into them and of course your sea sweet saying yeah absolutely we want that make that happen but realistically I don't think they're really understanding what's involved in allowing you to do that and I think it's important that we start to think about the different perspectives so really what I want to ask is do we actually all have the same understanding of devops and I would say no maybe this is just my opinion maybe this is something that you will resonate with but as I see we often end up in two situations we've got a leadership team on one side and you've got your engineers and your engineering teams on the other side and they're talking about this thing called devops but they're talking about a different thing you got leadership that are saying well we spent the last three years investing in our Dev SEC Ops application teams and yet we haven't got a faster time to Market we haven't achieved these higher quality products meanwhile you've got your engineers set on the other side going well really you need to invest in the things that allow us to build those those applications in a better way and that requires is having some sort of equipment or some way of actually handling those things that are repetitive that are time consuming that take up the time that we actually want to spend on building good stuff so really what we need to do is bring those two things together devops is actually making sure that the enablement is there the investment goes into that enablement to allow those things that happen within your Dev SEC Ops application teams to actually deliver some value to the business because ultimately that's what it's about Engineers don't just build for the sake well actually some Engineers do build for the sake of engineering but on the whole when you're working in a company it's because you want to do right for your customer so what should we be asking we talked about that Promised Land but what's the actual questions that we should be putting to people and I want to turn it around and say well actually some of these things are valid but I think we just need to rephrase them so rather than talking about the promised land let's make it real let's talk about the things that people can actually tangibly hold on to and think about so instead of talking about speed and time to Market you can say what is the biggest bottleneck that's preventing us from getting something out to our customer what holds us up instead of talking about collaboration and teamwork say what are we doing that doesn't have a clear purpose that might mean that people are arguing over priorities instead of talking about simply scaling and flexing which sounds really great probably when you're at the gym but in realistic terms what we want to know is what do we build where we lack confidence or or where do we feel like we don't actually want to touch that bit of code because we might break something down the line productivity everyone wants to be more productive of course they do but instead let's ask the question where are we spending time on repetitive tasks things that bore us things that are just in the way stopping us from doing the really good stuff and then finally rather than talking about simply quality let's ask the question which bugs keep falling through the cracks because they're the ones that we need to think about and they're the ones we need to deal with and handle so this is great and we've got some questions here and these are really poignant questions that we can start to ask our leadership teams our senior people other people outside of our Tech and our it teams but what do we do with those answers and a lot of the time questions will come up about well which framework and which methodology should we be using and actually there is no one- siiz fits all realistically what we need to make sure is that you ask those questions and you use the answers to determine what direction are we going in what drives us as a business what do we make decisions based upon what are the challenges that we might face and ultimately what are the incentives that will allow us to do better and if you can start to think about those things that will help you make informed decisions about where you invest your time your money and make your developers lives easier that is it from me and I hope that you take away some thoughts around how you can position this in a slightly less technical way to some of the people that are outside of the tech teams and outside of engineering uh because it's important that we start asking those good your questions to make sure that they start to understand a little bit more around how devops impacts the bottom line for the customer thank you very much [Music]