Track: Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking

Location: Bayview AB

Day of week:

DevOps, SRE, TechOps, System Administration and the rest have a common goal: stability and reliability. We will discuss how optimizations in SRE, observability, consistency, and training are vital for enhancing speed and operational excellence at scale. We will discuss the history of the competencies of DevOps as well as how we can work toward increasing the pipeline of new entities in the field.

Track Host: John Willis

Founder @botchagalupe

John Willis is the Founder of Botchagalupe Technologies. Before this, John was the Vice President of Devops and Digital Practices at SJ Technologies the Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker, which he joined after the company he co-founded (SocketPlane, which focused on SDN for containers) was acquired by Docker in March 2015. Previous to founding SocketPlane in Fall 2014, John was the Chief DevOps Evangelist at Dell, which he joined following the Enstratius acquisition in May 2013. He has also held past executive roles at Opscode/Chef and Canonical/Ubuntu. John is the author of 7 IBM Redbooks and is co-author of the “Devops Handbook” along with authors Gene Kim and Jez Humble.

10:35am - 11:25am

DevOps & Lean Thinking Panel

What are the latest trends and processes in DevOps & Lean Thinking? This panel will discuss what areas will enhance your team and platform's performance.

Cat Swetel, Agile Methods Coach & Advocate for Woman in Tech
Ben Rockwood, VP, Production Engineering @packethost
Damon Edwards, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer @Rundeck

11:50am - 12:40pm

Mapping the Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems

Is it any accident that devops was born at the same time cloud computing and platform as a service were exploding in popularity? Technology, process, and culture necessarily evolve together. Wouldn’t it be great to anticipate these critical shifts and changes, to be sensitized to the coevolution of technology, process, and culture? That would be a huge advantage!  

Wardley Maps are increasingly becoming a key practice in a lean thinker’s toolbox. The Wardley Mapping practice can be used to examine trends and options in context rather than falling victim to the tempting allure of buzzwords. That’s right, no more making your blockchain AI totally serverless through the digital transformation of modernized hybrid-clouds. This session will use Wardley Maps to examine the evolution of computing and explore potential futures. Attendees will leave ready and excited to start mapping!

Cat Swetel, Agile Methods Coach & Advocate for Woman in Tech

1:40pm - 2:30pm

DevOps & Lean Thinking Open Space

Session details to follow.

2:55pm - 3:45pm

The System of Profound Knowledge

Dr. Deming, the famous American who taught the Japanese after WWII and empowered them to become a manufacturing power-house in the decades to follow, latter to be brought back to the US as "LEAN", summarized his teachings at the end of his long life in four simple ideas known as the System of Profound Knowledge.  This system looks remarkably modern and sets forth a pattern of thinking that we, as a society, are still trying to fully implement.  Stop trying to imitate LEAN Practices and instead learn from the underlying ideas themselves to improve the way you learn, lead, and operate.

Ben Rockwood, VP, Production Engineering @packethost

4:10pm - 5:00pm

Incident Management in the Age of DevOps & SRE

Responding to failure is an organization's most important operations capability. Despite advances in Agile, CI/CD, and DevOps, how most organizations handle incidents hasn't changed all that much in the past 20 years. This talk will take a look at the techniques that high-performing operations organizations are using to finally transform how they identify, mobilize, and respond to incidents.

Damon Edwards, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer @Rundeck

5:25pm - 6:15pm

[CANCELLED] Balancing Priorities: Revenue Generation vs. Revenue Protection

Does the delivery of new features routinely take precedence over fixing technical debt at your company? Revenue protection work is like a poster child for the objectionable, “not in my project” response from project managers. An important constituent when it comes to maintaining a prosperous business, revenue protection work always seems to take a back seat to feature driven requests - especially when work is managed by project versus product. This talk explores the benefits of managing products through the lens of a value stream to better expose risks, examine priorities and reduce dependencies.

Dominica DeGrandis, Director of Digital Transformation @Tasktop

5:25pm - 6:15pm

Security and Compliance Theater - The Seventh Deadly Disease

Listen to author and evangelist John Willis describe the “Seven Deadly Diseases of Devops” with a focus on the most costly of them all - Security and Compliance Theater. This presentation will drill in on the practices needed to create long-term systemic “safe” improvement. Understanding these key patterns enables an organization to focus mainly on the intersection of human capital and technology. Although prescriptive practices like Lean, Agile, SAFE and even DevOps may be necessary for IT acceleration they are in most cases not sufficient for long-term systemic improvement. In other words, you can’t Lean, Agile, SAFe or DevOps your way around institutionalized organizational habits. The following is a list of the “Seven Deadly Diseases”:

  • Invisible Work
  • Management System Toil
  • Tribal Knowledge
  • Misalignment of Incentives
  • Incongruent Organizational Design
  • Misunderstanding Complexity
  • Security and Compliance Theater

These seven diseases of organizational behavior must be discovered with “absence of prescriptive practice” through a process of organizational fact-finding, something described as organizational forensics. In this presentation, we will look at the “Seven Deadly Diseases” of IT organization and show how all seven are indistinguishably related to cybersecurity, risk, and compliance.

John Willis, Founder @botchagalupe

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