CIO Interview: Jonny Wooldridge, director of Development & Operations, EE

Wooldridge discusses the cultural shift to working in a DevOps way

Jonny Wooldridge, director of development & operations at EE has described the need for transparency in the way his team works, in a recent video interview with Computing.

"I've got 450 people across the globe. There was quite a bit of work to do to take some of the foundations that were there previously and take them to the next level. One of the key things was around the transparency of what the team was doing. Often there's a sense that people don't know what digital is doing, and feel they're expensive. So I said to the team, let's make everything 110 per cent transparent.

"Whether it's our KPIs, the way we work, any blockers we have, let's surface that to the project management office and all of our stakeholders. And the tide is definitely turning in that now people say they understand how digital, and development and operations works, and what their key drivers and dependencies are. And that's really helped my team. From being a little bit secretive 18 months ago, to absolutely everything is out there, we have nothing to hide.

"We have really good people so let's showcase it."

He explained that EE's traditional spending model, investing heavily in infrastructure, needed to adapt to fit digital initiatives.

"We also changed the way we approach our initiatives. It's very much a company based on a big capex roadmap. EE is amazing at putting big masts up across the country to get that fantastic coverage. But that capex methodology doesn't work so well for digital initiatives. So how can we squared that off to fund the team in a way that helps drive innovation?

"I've realised over the years that funding is one of the major stumbling points in driving that agility across the team."

Wooldridge also discussed the switch to a DevOps mindset within his teams.

"Culture is a massive thing for me. I'm a servant leader. I'm here to get rid of your impediments. Whoever you are I want to hear about your processes, and what's blocking you. I think that was a surprise to my team, to get that sense that we aren't this hierarchy pushing down., we're here to support everybody. And we're trying to get that culture end to end to make the team feel happier and drive improvements.

"Everyone both externally and internally is talking about DevOps, but they're different things. It just happens that my team historically has been called ‘DevOps', before DevOps was even a thing. When I was presented with the opportunity of taking this job, the title ‘Director of DevOps' is an anti-pattern, it makes no sense.

"Then when I was talking through the role I realised it was development of operations. Which is a completely different thing. It means the role has end to end responsibility, which removes all the challenges I've had previously in big enterprises where you might own dev, or you might own ops, if that's gone away then we can drive end to end improvements, and that's really interesting.

"I look at my role and think I just couldn't do this if there was a director of ops saying ‘I need the stability'. Well I want the stability, but I understand that it comes from the dev side as well.

"So it's a fascinating challenge to get devops fully working in what's quite a big team."

Watch the video for more.