'Take your A-players and put them on one team,' advises Capital One's Gregory Mazurek

Let star 'star' developers take the DevOps lead, suggest Mazurek

Gregory Mazurek, senior director of engineering at credit-card company Capital One, has suggested that organisations should use their 'star developers' to spear-head their shift towards DevOps.

The suggestion was made at Computing's DevOps Summit 2017, attended by more than 200 IT leaders and senior professionals in London this week.

"It wasn't until I was at Capital One that I thought ‘Gosh, if you want to transform a company, take your A-players and put them on a team'," Mazurek said.

He continued: "I loved the idea of 'springing out' players from across teams, then 'raising the entire ocean'.

"But if you really want to take a team or culture from ‘good' to ‘awesome' identify those really good people, put them on one team and just give them the flag.

"I can't teach someone to tackle a problem, I can't teach someone to be passionate or to love technology, and I can't teach someone to go after things on their own.

"But I can teach someone what a continuous integration, continuous delivery (CICD) looks like, or what DevOps looks like, and what the culture is. What you find is that if you give them a little bit of it, it starts to run itself.

"If I had a company that was just purely Waterfall and approaching Agile and had 100 people, I'd take the five best of the group, carve them off as a separate team and say ‘run'," suggested Mazurek.

But even the best of teams can become complacent and stale, admitted Mark Ridley, group technology officer at venture capital 'builder' Blenheim Chalcott, appearing alongside Mazurek on the same panel.

"Having worked with development teams for about 20 years and with one development team for a very long time, I've seen pretty much every disfunction in a team that you can imagine. Everywhere from not wanting to change, to going through the excitement of changing and then ‘we're changing too much, we have to stop'," said Ridley.

He continued: "There's a number of management theories about how you construct teams, but taking group of people and making them jointly responsible for solving a challenging problem is about the most binding thing that you can do."

However, when putting together teams for different types of task, organisations need to consider different personality types, he suggested, especially as projects evolve.

"There are various different personality types. There are personalities that enjoy being in transition, and personality types that don't," said Ridley, admitting that he's in the form camp, rather than the latter.

"What that means that I have to know about myself, if I leave a project, I have to find people that are much more craving of stability. I think it's very important for you to identify the personalities of the people within the team and if there's some people who crave a challenge or likes to move quickly from challenge to challenge, that they are put in the transitional transformation teams and can then backfill with operations.

"These aren't things you can change about people. They either like them or don't like them. So it's very important that you identify the personalities of the individuals in the teams that you are using," advised Ridley.