Prioritizing Change

Lansing DevOps Meetup
October 1st, 2019

Brendon Thiede

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Chaser of shiny things
  • Shaking things up since '98

What is Change?

Cultural
Capabilities
Features
Revolution
Evolution
Top Down
Bottom Up

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Development Needs

Development Needs https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MaslowsHierarchyOfNeedsOfSoftwareDevelopment.aspx

Service Level Needs

SRE Service Hierarchy of Needs https://sre.google/sre-book/part-III-practices/

WSJF

SAFe:

(value + time criticality + risk reduction + opportunity enablement) / job size

Simplified:

importance / effort

Other Considerations

  • Capabilities/Maturity
  • Risks/Legal Responsibilities
  • Tolerance/Flexibility
  • Industry Trends/Developments

Meet the Hipster

  • Bleeding edge
  • Support is a secondary concern
  • Not concerned with the contribution base

Meet the Hater

  • Resists learning new paradigms
  • Can't imagine a better way
  • Only sees risk in early adoption

Meet the Hoarder

  • Always running a PoC
  • No framework for experimentation
  • No follow up or sunsetting

Be the Hero

  • Use a decision framework
  • Start with a hypothesis and make it testable
  • Focus on impact/value constraints
  • Have a whole-life plan
  • Minimize batch size

The Real World: Example 1

Source Control

  • Capabilities?
  • Risk reduction?
  • Implementation cost?

The Real World: Example 2

Microservices

  • Capabilities?
  • Risk reduction?
  • Implementation cost?