Making DevOps Valuable

In the past decade, most organizations have invested in DevOps, and by now many of those efforts have failed to meet expectations of the executive sponsors. Organizations have brought in the latest and greatest tools and often sped up their development process without seeing a clear benefit. Some invested in culture only to see collaboration wane and any progress stall. The DevOps pendulum swings between focus on technology and culture. The buzzwords, rituals and tools keep changing, but the results often seem to worsen over time.

Optimizing any one part of a system is often suboptimal for the whole system. The goal should never be to adopt but to adapt to the opportunities and challenges of our organizations, but what are those? This talk will give attendees a framework to analyze the flow of work through their unique sociotechnical system, to understand the specific flow of value and propose metrics to identify and prioritize iterative improvements. The presentation will be technology agnostic but will focus on mapping capabilities that appropriate technical tools and skills should achieve together.