DevOps is a “skin in the game” game. It’s about giving people the opportunity to solve their problems. Most “Enterprise” solutions are well-intentioned. But the buyers and implementers are rarely the user.
This is why Change Management processes suck and don’t produce desired outcomes. Change Management asks people who don’t know how the work is done or how to get the product to market to manage the work and its release to market. Of course, it sucks. I wouldn’t ask my accountant to rebuild the engine of my car. That’s what we do in IT.
We’re a Terraform Enterprise shop. I have yet to find someone who’s happy about this. The exception is the centralized team that decided to implement it and make it the standard. The product was billed as a simple “drop-in” … no process change or learning curve. I’ve been around it for nearly 6 months. It still makes no sense.
When problems aren’t solved holistically, they tend to create bigger problems. A $100,000 cost savings for the Monitoring Team that drives $100,000 in expense for 4 product teams, is not a solution. It’s a $300,000 problem in exchange for a $100,000 solution. And often the manager who delivers the $100,000 cost savings gets a raise.
Systems thinking doesn’t come naturally to most people. We tend to optimize for our own interests and world view. Re-reading that last sentence, I see it as tautological. Of course, we optimize for what benefits us and reflects how we understand things. The DevOps revolution is about overthrowing our own local optimized view and values in exchange for something that sees the results for the system as our results. DevOps is about thinking globally and acting locally.
