Mark Smalley

One of the tenets of DevOps is effective use of technology to automate and enable manual processes. Although technology has its challenges, the harder part is generally acknowledged to be the soft side that is about people and culture. This can also be regarded as enabling, because you can’t work effectively without a healthy team. Factors that help to provide a meaningful and rewarding employee experience include psychological safety, stress prevention, and dealing with ethical dilemmas.

This presentation shares these and other people-oriented topics that are described in the presenter’s recent book ‘High-velocity IT’.

Some of the main takeaways are:

• You will be more aware of the unprecedented societal, political, and economic impact of your work, and the importance of a healthy workplace
• You will realise that you are morally responsible for your actions including unintended consequences, and understand that ethics is influences by education and by personal values
• You will think more about the value of diversity of values within organisations

“There is a role for training and books – the goal of experiential learning is ... to provide low risk ways to try working in a different way ... there’s no better way than through simulations.” – Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project.

This interactive game, or ‘business simulation’, is based on the ground-breaking DevOps book The Phoenix Project. The game, that has been played more than 500 times in 30 countries, lets you experience the practical application of Lean, Agile and IT service management principles in a DevOps setting.

It helps you develop your culture to achieve better collaboration and in so doing, derive more business value from your investments in IT.

You play one of the business, application development and IT operations roles and your challenge is to work well as a team for an afternoon. Time and capacity are limited, so you have to make the right decisions and execute work correctly.

Most people say that the game reflects real life and that they take away concrete findings that they can apply at work.

More general information about The Phoenix Project at www.gamingworks.nl.