DevOps – A great work place = great work!

Jan Schilt’s written a great article here laying out what it takes to create and maintain the framework that allows for the most productivity with an eye on the service prize –

A great work place = great work!

Sounds like he works in a very empowered environment…

In my experience, I have found that a point person is required to manage the process, to play the roles of mediator between ‘tech’ and ‘leadership’, explaining ‘impact’ and budgetary concern in both directions –Providing the information each needs to integrate and inform decisions on moving forward; this is in addition to playing the ‘operational’ role of supporting and monitoring the structured change processes required to maintain the production environment, while facilitating the integration and mediation of customer ‘wants’ by managing expectations of internal and external customers. This must be done by providing meaningful information, this becomes the corner stone of future success.

High quality requires support from all sides, that is gained by gathering input from all stakeholders and providing the information each needs in a way that they can use…

No easy task, but when it is humming, there is nothing better.

Infrastructure requires incremental innovation

Elizabeth Weise’s USA Today article, Power outages a threat in cybersecurity order, highlights that infrastructure requires incremental innovation – radical / disruptive innovation must be contained in ‘acceptable loss bubbles’ , true ‘test’ environments with no impact on production services.

Radical / disruptive innovation is high risk and it has a high likelihood of generating black swans. Continuity and disruptive event planning and response work is many and varied and involves every aspect of a service. The up side is that the work returns value daily to the customer, the work place and to the bottom line. An article from the Incremental Innovation team elaborates on this further.