In 2016 I was hired as one of the head coaches of a massive DevOps transformation. The goal was to, in a 7000+ person IT organization, get teams fluent in topics such as CI/CD, automated testing, and product management. Our dojo team created a successful, impactful program at scale.
I’ll share experiences and learnings from my 6-month journey. Starting with the concept of a DevOps Dojo, we’ll then explore it from four, detailed perspectives: product, place, process, and people.
- Product: Elaborating on the classic “coder’s dojo” - focused on building technical skills - to a “DevOps Dojo” where we perfect technical skills while delivering on product learning goals.
- Place: A virtual tour through the engineering spaces that promote collaborative, rapid feedback, and high energy work.
- Process: How we scaled to 12 concurrent dojo teams of 4-16 people with a custom pull system (kanban) featuring unusual-but-realistic WIP limits.
- People: What skills (some surprising) does it take to make a program like this succeed? I’ll share the framing tool we developed for rapid team alignment during onboarding.
I think this is a pretty cool story. So many large-scale initiatives fail or dilute or slip back into waterfall mediocrity. This experience report gives attendees who are both operating at scale and within smaller teams several tools they can apply to their DevOps journey.
It's also a nice example of how a process can best serve people building a product. I think this is an important message in this day and age of Agile Management Fads™.
I recorded much of the experience and have many visual aids and side stories. There's a lot of visuals to support the narrative.
I'm happy to do a 50-minute version and a 3-hour deep dive; it's a lot of content.