Why Jose Mourinho would make a lousy DevOps manager

Command and control don't work with DevOps say Worldwide UK/I DevOps leaders

Manchester United fan Ryan Bryers introduced a tale of micromanagement at his favourite team to illustrate the hierarchical culture prevalent in so many large organisations.

"Jose Mourinho was delighted about how defender Luke Shaw played one game," he said. "He told him when to go forward, when to hold back, when to go in for a tackle, where to stand and Shaw obeyed. I'm a Man United fan but this sort of command and control is exactly what you don't want in DevOps. You need to trust people to play the game in their own way."

However, command and control is very natural for large organisations and it takes a continued effort of will to change the situation, he said.

Bryers, CTO at Atos subsidiary Worldline UK&I, was presenting at the Computing DevOps Summit today together with his colleague David Daly, global deal assurance manager, on the challenges of implementing a collaborative culture for DevOps and Agile.

The pair were sharing lessons derived from their own experience of making as wall as from the online forum devopschat.net, for which Daly runs the Twitter presence.

Lesson number one: Change needs to come from the top down

Many top managers struggle with the core concept of Agile and the lack of concrete development milestones and timelines. But you really need them on board.

"its hard to drive that change upwards," Bryers said. "Get an Agile coach in to explain to the senior executives the principles of DevOps and Agile. If management get's it then a top down approach is fine.

Lesson 2: enabling does not equate to action

"Telling people they're allowed to do something doesn't mean they'll do it," said Daly, citing the case of technical debt within Worldwide UK&I, a constant bugbear. However, when time and resource was set aside for the IT team to deal with the problem nothing happened.

"There was just no impetus to fix the problem."

Lesson 3: collaboration as a catalyst

What was needed was a catalyst for change.

"We introduced the collaboration tool Confluence," said Daly.

"Everyone is literally on same page, they can see each other's changes. Some project managers replaced Word and Sharepoint altogether and moved to Confulence and Jira."

Use of the collaboration tools has been extended to 150 customers too, with positive results. In one case a customer spotted an error in the code early in the process as they had full visibility into the project as it developed.

"We had misinterpreted a client role. The client was in the meeting and fixed the error in Confluence. It was a game changer. We fixed something early in five minutes instead of wasting five or six weeks on work that would have had to be undone," said Bryers.

Lesson 4: different projects need different approaches

"We did a greenfield project and found the best approach was to get half a dozen people who really knew what they are doing and then put a few others around them to learn," Bryers explained. However, existing projects require a different approach.

For migrating an old process into a new one you need to bring in the trainers first "to explain the whys" before go into the development.

Even traditional projects can be aided by a more collaborative approach, with more sharing of and checking of documents allowing for more frequent feedback.

Key to all this is cultural change. Daly shared a quote by business guru Peter Drucker: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

"You have to do something to make culture happen," he said.