May 2020

DevOps Institute
DevOps Journey SKILbook

Culture:
How To Build A Winning
DevOps Culture Of Innovation
By Shaaron A Alvares, Sr. Agile & DevOps Transformation Coach at T-Mobile
with Eveline Oehrlich, JP Garbani and Karen Skiles, DevOps Institute

Shaaron A Alvares Eveline Oehrlich

 Executive Summary
The key challenges to DevOps adoption and transformation
are not technology related but organizational and cultural.
Leaders must invest in their DevOps organizational change
capability and their cultural people strategies in order to
remain competitive while delivering continuous value at
scale. We identified DevOps cultural characteristics that are
required to support organizations’ DevOps adoption goals,
continuous innovation, speed and quality at scale. Creating
cultures of high trust and collaboration, enabling continuous
experimentation, improvement, and upskilling are key
investments that support DevOps return on investments.
Creating a Culture to Support
DevOps Transformation

As major global organizations are adopting or scaling their DevOps capability, 75% of
these initiatives will fail to meet their objectives through 2022, according to Gartner1.
The top reasons are not related to technology but to managing the organizational, cul-
tural, and people side of the change. As John Willis shared in 20102, “If you do not have
a culture to support your DevOps adoption, all automation attempts will be fruitless.”
While the focus remains on the DevOps technology and tooling, more research and sur-
veys conclude that DevOps is primarily about culture and its success is ultimately based
on creating a culture sponsored by leadership that effectively accelerates cross-function-
al and generational collaboration3 innovation and supports technological investments.
A recent MIT Sloan management Review and Glassdoor study4 confirmed that healthy
corporate cultures positively impact results and revenue. Based on surveys across multi-
ple high performing organizations, the study identified “Big Nine Cultural Values”.

DevOps Requires Moving Away

from Taylorism Leadership Principles

Although considered to be a team focused culture, DevOps requires a radically different

approach to leadership that encourages autonomy to support the pace of rapid innova-
tion. This leadership style requires moving away from Taylorism and adopting values and
principles inspired from Westrum and Transformational Leadership models. Within these
models, leaders work closely with teams to design and adopt a company culture based on
empowerment, ownership, and shared accountability. Both models are focused on moti-
vating and inspiring individuals in a positive way.

Westrum leadership model supports positive climates:

In 2004, Ron Westrum published “A Typology of Organiza-
tional Cultures5” where he introduced three organizational
culture models, “Pathological”, “Bureaucratic”, and “Genera-
tive”. Each are characterized by seven cultural criteria relat-
ed to authority and leadership, communication and collabo-
ration, supportive or punitive environment, and employees
behavioral response to the models.
1
In order to embrace DevOps as a holistic framework and
philosophy, and fully benefit from its potential, organiza-
tions need to work towards becoming a “Generative” culture
and establish the level of collaboration and cooperation,
openness and transparency that teams and individuals need
to be successful. A Generative culture focuses on a positive
climate of motivation, encouragement, failure as opportuni-
ties, affirmative, and nurturing support, rather than seeking
to blame and punish experiments.

Transformational leaders inspire others: The concepts

of transformational leadership were introduced by James
Downton in 1973. In 1985, Bernard Bass6 later introduced
better ways for measuring the impact of transformational
leadership on people and organizations. Transformational
leadership believes that employees are inspired to deliv-
er their best and feel engaged when leaders demonstrate
ethics, authenticity, accountability, and empathy. Leaders
understand the importance of trained employees and relay
the decision-making process down to teams to give them
the ability to be more creative and innovative. Key trans-
formational leadership continuously displays authenticity,
cooperation, transparency, and open communication. In
these organizations, leaders foster a vision with clear values,
goals, and priorities. They model behaviors themselves that
encourage teams and individuals to embrace a mindset of
trust, empathy, and collaboration enabling them to focus
their energy delivering on common shared goals. Bass add-
ed that leaders need to rise above their own self-interest
and prioritize the ethical interest of the organization and its
employees.

2
Reward Innovation through Continuous
Experimentation and Relentless Improvements

Innovating means generating and trying new ideas. For this reason, the most innovative
DevOps organizations and culture not only support experimentation, but they encourage
and reward it through various active strategies such as Test & Learn practices, Hack-
athons, and continuous collaboration with customers and end users. Through the intro-
duction of these practices, organizations and leadership progressively learn to change
their attitude towards failure. Teams that are empowered to experiment and decide on
improvement opportunities develop a great sense of purpose and ownership leading to
greater engagement. The following are key concepts to inspire innovation.

Continuous experimentation leads to new ideas: The

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)7 reported that
successful teams are empowered to experiment with new
ideas and to make changes to features without having to
request permission from management. As they experiment,
they can and will fail. Leadership and management need to
support and reward an environment where developers will
be confident trying and testing new ideas, which in turn
leads to creating a culture of learning. A key objective and
benefit of testing, failing fast, and learning is to mitigate the
risks of making major investments in initiatives that will not
work. Booking.com established a culture of experimentation
and testing supported by one of their core company te-
nets: Anyone can test anything; this without management’s
permission. This culture allowed the company to transform
from a start-up to being one of the world’s largest online
accommodation platforms8.

3
Relentless improvements focus on continuously challenging
the status quo: Leveraging the principle of relentless im-
provements enables a team to challenge the existing status
quo and look for areas to holistically improve processes,
technology, performance, speed, resources, and investments
to support innovation velocity, time to market, and quality.
This means moving away from a mindset of defined long-
term goals and perfectionism. Organizations need to design
flexible systems, teams’ structures, and ways of collabo-
rating and making decisions to not only quickly identify
opportunities but to quickly act on them. LEGO success-
fully reinvented itself by establishing Lean and continuous
improvement strategies empowering any employee to log
improvement ideas and opportunities in an application
accessible globally across the company. They shifted their
ways of working to include rapid prototyping and customer
involvement in product design.

Team autonomy and empowerment fuel engagement and

innovation: When autonomous teams are empowered to
not only establish their own work practices but also define
features, they develop a stronger sense of purpose and
engagement leading to greater knowledge, creative prob-
lem-solving, and innovation. Because they are proven to de-
liver successful outcomes more consistently, many organiza-
tions opt for these teams dynamic and structure over other
types of teams. These successful empowered teams re-
vealed a unique set of organizational requirements. Because
they work to solve technology and integration problems
across multiple disciplines, they need an organization-wide
commitment from leadership to support their autonomy.
Leaders must foster an entrepreneurial environment with
a flatter, more adaptive reporting structure to enable quick
decision-making and pivoting faster to market trends and
changes. Lastly, leaders need to create an environment
where everyone is a leader, and anyone can lead without a
title. Leadership becomes an integral part of these organiza-
tions’ DNA and their way of life. These organizations en-
courage open space agility and ways of collaborating, there
by inviting everyone to voice their ideas.

4
Building a customer-obsessed culture leads to better
products: The most successful companies do this by en-
gaging their customers and end users in every step of the
product lifecycle, from ideation to operationalization, and
adoption measurement through telemetry. This results in
effectively training engineering teams to empathize with
customers, understand the business language, and build
effective relationships with the people who buy their prod-
ucts. Here are some ideas on how to do this. At the incep-
tion steps, include engineers in ideation, iterative design
thinking, human-centered mapping, and design workshops.
Throughout the iterative development phase, invite real
customers to test features in development stages. Orga-
nizations should aspire to breaking down silos between
engineering and product in new and creative ways9. An
opportunity is to create Value Stream dojos to provide a
more holistic product driven experience for customers and
employees. Pivotal Labs invites real customers and end us-
ers to interact with engineers and test features on a weekly
basis. They then plug customer feedback and new requests
back into the product backlog in real time. Amazon, who is
the leader in customer-obsessed culture, built a culture and
strategy not based on competition, but rather on customer
obsession. Putting the customer’s experience first, they do
not start working on a feature until they know how they will
collect and measure their customers response and busi-
ness outcomes. Based on his experience working at eBay,
Google, and WeWork, Randy Shoup reminds us that “Teams
also need to be directly aligned to business objectives, and
capable of delivering incremental software traced directly
to business objectives and customer value. Teams are also
required to measure not only their engineering and develop-
ment performance, but business metrics that matter to the
end users.9”

5
Create Diverse Teams and Grow Inclusive Teams

Cultures that have more diverse management teams drive 19% higher revenue due to
innovation11. Racially diverse teams outperform non-diverse ones by 35%12. More than
67% of job seekers look for evidence of diversity before considering an organization
or accepting an offer13. There is a well documented relationship between inclusion and
innovation. Inclusive teams create more unlikely ideas. A diverse team of decision-makers
prevents group thinking and bad product decisions. Yet many companies still struggle to
create an inclusive environment for their teams. To create a more inclusive environment
and culture, organizations need to design a strategy with clear objectives, make it a prior-
ity with their employees, and measure and communicate the results. This can be done by
adopting the following.

Prioritize inclusive sourcing and hiring techniques: The most

advanced technology organizations widen their sourcing net
to include a more diverse population. Job descriptions are
written in ways that appeal to diversity, women or a less ex-
perienced workforce. Pivotal-VMware, as an example, intro-
duced an explicit clause in each job description mentioning
that the application will remain open until they have at least
two qualified candidates from underrepresented communi-
ties14. Adopting blind applications has proven to lead to more
women applicants and hiring. Gartner15 suggests leveraging
new artificial intelligence and behavior-analysis-powered
applications to avoid unconscious biases in hiring and to
boost team’s diversity. Effective techniques consist of involv-
ing a diverse hiring panel and focus on recruiting for culture
add rather than culture fit. These organizations demonstrate
curiosity and interest in differences.

Inclusion as an everyone’s responsibility is a significant

trend and imperative. Diversity moved from being the re-
sponsibility of Human Resources to be everyone’s account-
ability16. Research demonstrated that teams which operate
in an inclusive culture outperform their peers by a staggering
80%17. Since Google’s Aristotle study18, DevOps managers
and teams understand the relationship between safety, be-
longing, productivity, and innovation. Teams, understanding
that everyone’s voice is valuable and counts, take ownership
in driving an inclusive team culture to ensure that everyone
belongs and feels safe to share ideas and opinions. 6
Sustain Innovation Through Learning and Upskilling

With the growing pace of technology innovation, creating a learning and upskilling or-
ganization enables businesses to stay competitive while delivering on their digital trans-
formation goals. The IT skill gaps costs organizations more than $800,000 annually19.
DevOps organizations invest in learning and upskilling strategies as a mean to quickly
adapt to the pace of change, maximize productivity and business continuity with existing
resources. They attract, engage and retain the best developers and engineers, and deliver
the best high-quality technology products and services to increase their customer base
and revenue.

Upskilling cannot wait, it must be addressed now. Organi-

zations need to create an agile learning and development
strategy and systems able to pivot quickly to rapidly chang-
ing technology trends20. Upskilling is still a new capability
that organizations strive to address. The DevOps 2020
Upskilling Report found that over 38% of surveyed organi-
zations do not have any upskilling strategy nor program and
only 21% are currently working on building these21. More
than 94% of employees would stay at their company longer
if it had learning and development programs22 while orga-
nizations are looking to hire E-shaped professionals with
cross-functional skill23. Here in lies an opportunity.

Upskilling has key benefits for companies and individuals.

The continuous change in business models and new tech-
nology innovations forces an ongoing evaluation of new
skill sets to achieve organizational success. The best candi-
dates will move toward companies that offer upskilling and
reskilling benefits. Learning opportunities can, therefore,
become a significant employer branding advantage. Upskill-
ing also protects business continuity by mitigating employee
turnover and securing qualified in-house successors. Orga-
nizations also know that all types of skills need to be con-
tinuously built. Companies like Amazon, PWC, IBM, AT&T
and JP Morgan Chase are all examples of companies which
have placed significant investments into upskilling programs.
Their goals are to foster a culture and accountability of life-
long learning and clear career pathways.

7
What It Means
Design, Prioritize and Measure Your DevOps Culture
for Continuous Improvement

The cultural DevOps characteristics described above are among the most adopted and
known to improve and accelerate organizational DevOps adoption and transformation.
Each organization needs to design their own DevOps culture that best supports their
journey, vision, and strategic business outcomes leveraging the pillars of DevOps culture
(see Figure 1). As organizations thrive to adapt to the pace of change, digital transforma-
tion, and technology innovation, leaders need to create a collaborative cultural roadmap
to adopt the values and behaviors identified and required to support the business vision
and goals, and continuously assess, measure and iterate on these. The following are key
steps.

Figure 1:
The Eight Pillars
of DevOps Culture

Source: Shaaron A Alvares

8
Plan the DevOps Cultural Transformation: Framing the rea-
sons why organizations are adopting DevOps and its impact
for the business and on the organization, will lay the ground
of the cultural transformation roadmap. The cultural change
will be more effectively received if everyone in the organiza-
tion understands how it anchors in and supports the technol-
ogy roadmap.

Ensure that culture and technology align. The cultural trans-

formation roadmap needs to work in tandem with the tech-
nology roadmap in order to remain aligned and to timely
address needs based on new information or challenges. Iden-
tifying metrics across business, culture, and technology will
allow organizations to monitor and measure the outcome of
cultural investments. Those metrics can be the rate of innova-
tion, time to market, team productivity, and happiness index.

Educate leaders about the DevOps cultural implications.

Leaders tend to minimize or misunderstand the cultural
implications of DevOps transformations. They need to be an
integral part of the transformation. Develop a leadership plan
to allow organizations to understand their role and responsi-
bilities to steward the change more effectively.

Develop targeted cultural assessments. These assessments

are great tools to collect and analyze cultural challenges spe-
cific to the organization. Honest and transparent assessments
through surveys, interviews, and informal forums such as a
Slack feedback channel, will allow the transformation to have
a baseline to start with and build upon.

9
Develop a cultural change transformation product backlog.
The assessment will provide findings and feedback which
should be available to the organization to continuously work
on. It should be iterated on by a core transformational team
which will work in tandem with leadership and the technolo-
gy teams to continuously improve culture.

Create a network of change agents and coaches. They will

support people and teams throughout the change. These
individuals will be able to assist and advise throughout the
journey.

Leverage open space agility and All Hands-on Deck tech-

niques. This will allow the transformational team
to radically and intentionally include everyone in the work
and execution roadmap. This approach drives a much higher
employee engagement and satisfaction level because every-
one feels empowered to contribute and feels consulted.

Create robust and sustainable empathy and feedback mech-

anisms. Such feedback loops are key throughout the transfor-
mation as they consistently integrate the feedback into the
transformation product backlog.

Continuously iterate on the cultural transformation backlog.

To do this it is best to leverage accomplishments, setbacks,
and feedback. Working closely with the technology teams will
help maintain and adjust the right pace and momentum.

10
Develop a Value Stream dojo, instead of a DevOps dojo.
DevOps dojos are focused almost exclusively on supporting
technology adoption, whereas a Value Stream dojo invites all
stakeholders of a value stream to develop collaborative adop-
tion and improvement experimentations, coaching and train-
ing. Value Stream dojos speed cross-functional collaboration,
in particular between product and development.

Identify shared outcomes and metrics. It is critical to iden-

tify cross-functional metrics, measure and communicate the
cultural results and business outcomes throughout the trans-
formation journey.

Communicate relentlessly the cultural changes and accom-

plishments. The best way to sustain momentum is to make
employees feel great about their engagement and their pos-
itive impact on their organizational culture and innovation.
Keep the big picture and system thinking in mind and always
tie the cultural achievements back to the business and tech-
nology roadmap.

11
References
1 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-secret-to-devops-success/
2 https://blog.chef.io/what-devops-means-to-me/
3 https://insights.devopsinstitute.com/hubfs/Upskilling%202020/2020%20Upskilling-%20Enterprise%20
DevOps%20Skills%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=2020%20Upskilling%20Report%20-%20Promo&utm_
source=hs_automation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=84970497&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--GK0cf4KQZm_
DmYGowLDgY9KNoObTv3ALnAxF0J3agbff-ZKvybcKocsgT7tYswDMgAgvHIr8fUFLfu2VNNAfSDuSBCG_
jXMyXnvuxdVv-GMs_298&_hsmi=84970497
4 https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/measuring-culture-in-leading-companies/
5 https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_2/ii22
6 https://www.amazon.com/LEADERSHIP-PERFORMANCE-BEYOND-EXPECTATIONS-Bernard/
dp/0029018102/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318268507&sr=1-1-spell/bigdogsbowlofbis
7 https://cloud.google.com/devops
8 https://hbr.org/2020/03/productive-innovation
9 Breaking Down Silos Between Product management and Development: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=7SGHStr4tZQ
10 https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/07/speed-scale-wework/?itm_source=infoq&itm_campaign=us-
er_page&itm_medium=link
11 https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation.aspx
12 https://blog.clearcompany.com/10-diversity-hiring-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-decisions
13 https://hbr.org/2019/02/research-when-gender-diversity-makes-firms-more-productive
14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT1qbLtm1u8
15 https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/01/team-inclusion-workplace-AI/
16 https://devopsinstitute.com/2020/04/03/inclusiveness-and-diversity-are-critical-for-transformatio-
nal-managers-and-teams-ep12/
17 https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/human-capital/deloitte-au-hc-diver-
sity-inclusion-soup-0513.pdf
18 https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
19 https://trainingmag.com/how-upskill-employees-fill-tech-skills-gap/
20 https://insights.devopsinstitute.com/hubfs/Upskilling%202020/2020%20Upskilling-%20Enterprise%20
DevOps%20Skills%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=2020%20Upskilling%20Report%20-%20Promo&utm_
source=hs_automation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=84970497&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--GK0cf4KQZm_
DmYGowLDgY9KNoObTv3ALnAxF0J3agbff-ZKvybcKocsgT7tYswDMgAgvHIr8fUFLfu2VNNAfSDuSBCG_
jXMyXnvuxdVv-GMs_298&_hsmi=84970497
21 https://insights.devopsinstitute.com/hubfs/Upskilling%202020/2020%20Upskilling-%20Enterprise%20
DevOps%20Skills%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=2020%20Upskilling%20Report%20-%20Promo&utm_
source=hs_automation&utm_medium=email&utm_content=84970497&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--GK0cf4KQZm_
DmYGowLDgY9KNoObTv3ALnAxF0J3agbff-ZKvybcKocsgT7tYswDMgAgvHIr8fUFLfu2VNNAfSDuSBCG_
jXMyXnvuxdVv-GMs_298&_hsmi=84970497
22 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/94percent-of-employees-would-stay-at-a-company-for-this-one-
reason.html
23 https://devops.com/got-devops-skills-a-look-at-the-upskilling-enterprise-devops-skills-report/

About the Authors

Shaaron A Alvares works as an Agile and DevOps Transformation Coach at T-Mobile, an

Editor for DevOps, Culture and Methods at InfoQ and an Ambassador at DevOps Insti-
tute. She led significant Lean, Agile and DevOps practice adoptions and transformations
at global F500 companies such as ALCOA, Amazon.com, Expedia, Microsoft, and T-Mo-
bile. She focuses on introducing customized value-driven practices aligned with organiza-
tional cultural and performance goals.

Eveline Oehrlich is Chief Research Director at DevOps Institute. She conducts research
on topics focusing on DevOps as well as Business and IT Automation. She held the po-
sition of VP and Research Director at Forrester Research, where she led and conducted
research around a variety of topics including DevOps, Digital Operational Excellence, IT
and Enterprise Service Management, Cognitive Intelligence and Application Performance
Management for 13 years. She has advised leaders and teams across small and large en-
terprises in the world on challenges and possible changes to people, process and tech-
nology. She is the author of many research papers and thought leadership pieces and a
well-known presenter and speaker within the IT industry. Eveline has more than 25 years
of experience in IT.
About DevOps Institute

DevOps Institute is dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps success. As a

global member-based association, DevOps Institute is the go-to learning hub connecting
IT practitioners, education partners, consultants, talent acquisition and business execu-
tives to help pave the way to support digital transformation and the New IT.

We help advance careers and support emerging practices within the DevOps community
based on a human centered SKIL Framework, consisting of Skills, Knowledge, Ideas, and
Learning. All our work, including accreditations, research, events, and continuous learn-
ing programs, is focused on providing the “human know-how” to modernize IT and make
DevOps succeed.

Address and Other Details

Please contact
[email protected]
for questions about this report.