Value of DevOps Culture: It's not just hugs and kumbaya

The importance of culture is a recurring theme in most DevOps discussions. It's often cited as the thing your should start with and the thing you should worry about the most.

But other than the rather obvious idea that it's beneficial for any company to have a culture of trust, communication, and collaboration... can using DevOps thinking to change your culture actually provide a distinct business advantage?

Let's take the example of Continuous Deployment (or it's sibling, Continuous Delivery). This is an operating model that embodies a lot of the ideals that you'll hear about in DevOps circles and is impossible to properly implement if your org suffers from DevOps problems. 

Continuous Deployment is not just a model where companies can release services quicker and more reliably (if you don't understand why that is NOT a paradox, please go read more about Continuous Deployment). Whether or not you think it could work for your organization, Continuous Deployment is a model that has been proven to unleash the creative and inventive potential of other organizations. Because of this, Continuous Deployment is a good proxy for examining the effects of solving DevOps problems.

Eric Ries sums it up better than I can when he describes the transformative effect that takes place the further you can reduce the cost, friction, and time between releases (i.e. tests to see if you can better please the customer).

"When you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians."

-Eric Ries
  The Lean Startup (pg. 33) 

 
That's a business advantage. That's value derived from a DevOps-style change in culture.

Comments

[Britney]

I have to admit I am very impressed with the quality of your blog. It is certainly a pleasure to read as I do enjoy your posts.

[Brochure Printing]

A simple yet very informative illustration on the difference culture can make.

[Charlie]

Glad I found this when browsing through my queue of unread blog posts.

YES, you are absolutely correct. I recently moved from an environment where sysadmins where actively fighting with devs who wanted to be able to run a script to roll out their code (without babysitting from ops), to a pretty much ideal culture (complete with continuous integration/deployment). The speed with which the business can move is truly shocking, in the latter - night and day.