Tomek Pająk
Tomek Pająk (Lodz, Poland) has held several roles in IT: Software Engineer, IT Architect, and Engineering Team Lead. At the moment, he is Software Engineering Manager in SEQR and is responsible for services built on top of the core product – a mobile-payments solution available in 16 countries (including the US, UK, Sweden, and most of the Eurozone). To obtain competitive advantage of a company, he nurtures in organization Lean Startup and Scrum (for relevant product development) and DevOps (for rapid and reliable product development). He is also a coach at Sages, helping companies to improve their businesses through the adoption of agile/lean concepts and certain technologies. Tomek received his MBA from Akademia Leona Kozminskiego and a MSc in Telecommunications and Computer Science from Technical University of Lodz. He speaks at international conferences such as Agile Lean Europe, Agile Central Europe, Agile Cambridge, Agile Eastern Europe, Atmosphere, and AgileByExample. You can find my article about DevOps implementation at InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/articles/devops-seamless-why-how-what .
DevOps transformation tailored to organizational culture
Your organization decided to implement Scrum. However, Scrum will not solve your problems, it will make them visible. One of the challenges you may face is how to construct a high-performing organization which is able to deliver shippable increments at least every sprint. This means that your organization needs to be able to bring new ideas to production environment really fast.
And here comes DevOps which fulfills a promise given by Scrum. DevOps understood comprehensively as certain culture and tools shared by everyone in the company. How to perform DevOps transformation then? If you agree that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, strategy of building high-performing organization via DevOps must be tailored to culture a given organization has. Hence, based on Competing Values Framework (by Cameron and Quinn) I would like to take a closer look at what DevOps transformation actually means in terms of influencing organizational culture. My thesis is that depending on organizational culture (hierarchy, clan, market or adhocracy) different approach to DevOps transformation should be taken for it to be successful. Bearing this in mind, how should you modify constraints in your organization to influence culture change in the right direction? What challenges may you face depending on the existing culture? To answer those questions, the key thing is to understand that transformation is highly contextual and different types of leadership (mentor, organizer, visionary or hard driver?) are required in each case. Eventually, chances of the transformation being successful vary with respect to existing culture as well.
In my talk I would like to discuss those issues based on my experience as Software Engineering Manager being responsible for the DevOps transformation and as a coach witnessing other organizations trying to perform the change. I would like to provide you with a thorough case study of an organization and the corresponding transformation, which - hopefully - can be used as an example of similar insight into your company.
Slides Video