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Since childhood, Thomas has prioritized and emphasized human service and has always had a genuine passion for technology. Thomas is adept at recognizing and personally investing in open source market-leading platforms. He uses his insight and genuine desire for service to help his customers with their most difficult continuous delivery problems.
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A Noir Software Supply Chain Story
My name is Thomas A. McGonagle. The most positive experience of my life was playing football for eight years. I was voted a first-team All-Star in high school and then went on to play in college at Bentley University, which is a Division II program a...
Prompt #1 I need an analogy for offensive and defensive security with respect to devops. I like the title DevSecOps and like Krav Maga analogies Prompt #2 You are a 15-year experienced DevOps professional who is writing a blog on the importance of si...
Colonel John Boyd was one of the best fighter pilots on the planet who risked his life every time he jumped into the cockpit. But thanks to his OODA loop strategy, high-velocity chases, death-defying rolls, and last-gasp pivots were no longer uncomfo...
Ari Libarikian is a senior partner of Leap, McKinsey's business-building capability. He explains that “the companies that have stayed at the top for decades are always regenerating. This is really a requirement to being successful today.” Serial busi...
This blog was originally published on February 18, 2016 on the CloudBees blog. here.
This is the first blog in an ongoing series of blogs about DevOps culture. That is, the environment necessary to attain a DevOps culture and how that culture benefits teams – and, ultimately, returns value to the business. I have been in the continuous delivery and DevOps industry for nine years and have made a number of observations during that time. I have seen strategies succeed – and fail. My goal is to try to help you be one of the successes! I’d love to hear your comments and experiences with continuous delivery and DevOps, too!
According to Ian Head, a Gartner Research Director:
“By 2018 90% of organizations attempting to use DevOps without specifically addressing their cultural foundations will fail.”
These failures will be fundamentally failures of teamwork. This is unfortunate, because the benefits of teamwork, according to Wikipedia , are increased problem solving, healthy competition, development of relationships and the sharing of unique knowledge and ability. Teamwork is more than a DevOps competitive advantage, it is the way we as humans get things done and is also a significant critical business driver.
Dysfunctional teams will flail in their DevOps efforts. Organizations must make every effort to improve teamwork and utilize team-oriented approaches and tools. The CloudBees Jenkins Platform is one such tool. It provides the foundation for a DevOps team to organize and orchestrate its processes. It allows the team to focus on the mission at hand – accelerating the delivery of high quality software. It provides a team the ability and visibility to continuously assess their work. A continuous delivery pipeline is similar to a rowing or crew team. Each team member is working in concert towards a common goal. Their work developing the commit, build, test, stage and deploy phases require the dev, QA, and ops teams to work together. With the CloudBees Jenkins Platform, the process is orchestrated by Jenkins, the boat’s coxswain in this metaphor.
Jenkin’s similarities to rowing aside, the sport of rowing is considered one of the most difficult cardiovascular activities. A two kilometer race is the equivalent of playing two basketball games back to back. The sports grueling nature is a reason why we should look to it to learn about teamwork and apply it to DevOps. Championship rowing teams are built on trust, dedication, selflessness, determination, honesty and commitment. Teamwork is essential to keep the boat afloat. Without a common direction, the rowers will find they quickly run out of energy and resources. Rowers sit with their backs to the front. They can’t see where they are going. In order to be effective, rowers need to be able to trust the judgments of their leader and that other team members will do their jobs.
Teamwork is as important in rowing as it is in DevOps. The team should move in tandem, support one another and work towards shared success. Conflicting interests can destroy productivity and create turmoil. Teamwork is the fuel that allows a DevOps organization to be agile, to move in any direction, and with velocity.
In my next post, I will talk about a DevOps culture of CompOps a portmanteau of Compliance driven DevOps, its importance and how it could benefit your organization.
Thomas McGonagle Senior DevOps Consultant, Global Services CloudBees