DevOps is often misunderstood as simply tools and process, and that's part of the story but misses the mark. DevOps is really about building greater cross-organizational teamwork. Teamwork that ultimately enables speedier time-to-market, higher quality, and more rapid learning. Traditionally, this isn't how people work. It wasn't how I worked when I was a functional manager. I was focused on my individual part of the puzzle being great, not on what really mattered to our customers or the organization. A big production outage provided a great catalyst for me to rethink how I worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it was very instructive.

Technical debt, one of the key drivers of slow delivery, is rarely understood by non-technical business people. Even rarer are companies who have a strategy for investing in its reduction, which has been jointly agreed to by both business and technology groups. Debt is viewed as a problem for technology to address, not a systemic issue. Unfortunately, this leads to longer cycle times, higher costs, and lengthy time-to-market. The DevOps focus on continuous improvement is displaced by behavior that leads to continuous worsening. For companies to improve, the reduction of technical debt must be understood and addressed as a systemic issue.

Most teams never explicitly state how they commit to working together. They just start working and may eventually get better. I’ve found, however, that teams can get better faster if they spend some time up front talking about their working agreements. Here are some examples: