Even if your shop hasn't embraced DevOps and has no plans to do so, the practice offers leadership and communication guidance applicable to nearly every facet of IT. Here's what we learned from presentations at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco.

Susan Nunziata, Editorial Director

November 15, 2016

5 Min Read
<p align="left">(Image: Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock)</p>

Gartner's 10 Tech Predictions That Will Change IT

Gartner's 10 Tech Predictions That Will Change IT


Gartner's 10 Tech Predictions That Will Change IT (Click image for larger view and slideshow.)

If you're an IT professional struggling with change management (and really, who isn't these days?) there's much to be learned from DevOps experts. Even if your shop hasn't embraced DevOps and has no plans to do so, the practice offers leadership and communication guidance applicable to nearly every facet of IT.

That's our key takeaway from the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco Nov. 7 to 9, where we heard speakers from Allstate, Starbucks, and Hearst Business Media, among many others, share their experiences managing change.

Three key themes emerged to help any professional tackle change management:

  • Don't drop a new direction on your team and run.

  • Find ways to make work visible to all stakeholders.

  • Embrace value-stream mapping.

The bottom line? Be proactive about how you're managing change.

"One of the biggest reasons transformation efforts fail is if we don't walk the talk," said Allstate's Opal Perry, divisional CIO for claims and VP for technology and strategic ventures. Before beginning a change management process, the key question Perry and her team asked themselves was, "What are the things impeding people from taking risks?"

The team quickly discovered staffers were afraid leadership was going to change its mind in a few months, so they were hesitant to embrace change.

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To overcome this hurdle, Perry and her team focused on promoting values-driven behavior, which leaders were expected to demonstrate by their actions, not merely their talk. "We needed a set of tech values that would be a litmus test to help us drive this transformation," she said.

The team settled on five key values:

  • We support each other.

  • We allow freedom of action.

  • We practice agility with purpose.

  • We act as change catalysts.

  • We leave things better than we found them.

"We then put forth a set of behaviors based on these values," said Perry. "We believe if we demonstrate these behaviors, it will become part of our values."

To avoid the drop-and-run method of change management so common in many organizations, Perry and her team decided to take on a proactive role. "We use tools like culture hacks to make sure we are really courageously managing change, instead of handing stuff down and leaving folks stranded in the process," said Perry.

It was also incumbent upon leadership to "continually reinforce that we are making deliberate change," said Perry. This is no easy task in a traditionally hierarchical culture, like the insurance industry. "[The culture] has risk aversion," said Perry. "We had to let go of the command-and-control tradition and embrace the team of teams [approach]."

Once strategic priorities are developed and communicated, the next step is figuring out how to align team capacity against those strategic priorities, according to Courtney Kissler, VP of retail technology for global POS at Starbucks.

"Like any organization, there are competing priorities," Kissler said. "How can you really get a good understanding of your team's capacity when the work might not be visible? How do we make the work visible, and how do we do a good job of aligning that capacity?"

In October 2015, Starbucks hired its first CTO, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, former SVP and CIO at Adobe Systems. "She noticed there was a need for a common vocabulary," said Kissler. "One of first things she did was bring a group of people together to help create a common language and definition around our technology capabilities."

Martin-Flickinger also rebranded Starbucks IT as Starbucks Technology, which "set a different tone for the organization," said Kissler.

Most important of all, Kissler said, the team had a value-stream map. "One of the leaders was a trailblazer in bringing the team together and documenting value stream for the POS team," said Kissler. Having a value-stream map helped the organization remain clear on what value was being derived every step of the way during a project.

Value-stream mapping also played a big part in IT transformation at Hearst Business Media. "It's one of the most beneficial and helpful things we've been able to implement at Hearst Business Media," said Alexa Alley, the company's DevOps program manager.

iSixSigma defines value-stream mapping as "a paper and pencil tool that helps you to see and understand the flow of material and information as a product or service makes its way through the value stream… A value stream map (aka end-to-end system map) takes into account not only the activity of the product, but the management and information systems that support the basic process."

Beyond mastering the process itself, Alley stressed the importance of factoring in human nature. Among the behaviors her team saw during its value-stream mapping process were:

  • Defensive posturing around an individual's or a team's process and goals.

  • Individuals who added nothing but eagerly shot down the ideas of others.

  • Disagreements about how to measure success.

In the end, though, value-stream mapping is a valuable endeavor to "increase performance across the entire system, increase feedback loops and communication, and build a culture that allows for experimentation, continual iteration, and learning," said Alley. "Anyone can build this competency in your organization."

How do your change management experiences compare? Has your organization embraced DevOps? Is value-stream mapping part of your IT practice? Tell us about your own experiences in the comments section below.

About the Author(s)

Susan Nunziata

Editorial Director

Susan Nunziata leads the site's content team and contributors to guide topics, direct strategies, and pursue new ideas, all in the interest of sharing practicable insights with our community.
Nunziata was most recently Director of Editorial for EnterpriseEfficiency.com, a UBM Tech community. Prior to joining UBM Tech, Nunziata was Editorial Director for the Ziff Davis Enterprise portfolio of Websites, which includes eWEEK, Baseline, and CIO Insight. From 2010-2012, she also served as Editor in Chief of CIO Insight. Prior to joining Ziff Davis Enterprise, she served as Editor in Chief of Mobile Enterprise from 2007 to 2010. A frequent public speaker, Nunziata has entertained audiences with compelling topics such as "Enterprise Mobility" and "The Multigenerational Workforce." She even managed to snag invitations to speak at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium – not once, but twice (and those folks are smart). In a past life, she worked as a lead editor for entertainment and marketing publications, including Billboard, Music Business International, and Entertainment Marketing Letter.A native New Yorker, in August 2011 Nunziata inexplicably picked up stakes and relocated to the only place in the country with a higher cost of living: The San Francisco Bay Area. A telecommuter, her office mates are two dogs and two extremely well fed cats. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from St. John's University in Jamaica, N.Y. (and she doesn't even watch basketball).

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