ITSM Professor

T’was a month before Christmas on the pipeline, not a heart was beating not even mine.
For the product owner there is work to be “DONE”, so into the “Sprint Log” the work has begun! ­­­­
On Dasher! On Prancer (Development Deer) - QA and Security, they are all here.
Red hats worn by all and only one “White”; The teams almost ready, so don’t you fright.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear, a massive build from the Ops Engineer!
This today, that tomorrow, “Fail Fast” and learn there is no sorrow!
Ho Ho Ho! A jolly Scrum Master appears; impediments removed we all give a cheer!
Ops leads the way with their nose shining bright; we are agile and fast and we’re out of site!
Off with a flash, then “deer-to-deer” review”; here comes the surprise, it's coming to YOU.
We stand all amazed, and straight is our gaze.  The Christmas tree stands all tall and bright; its branches are massive and covered with lights!  On top is a star that streams long bright bars, spreading LOVE, PEACE and…

Originally Published on the DevOps Institute Site
It has become a truism within the DevOps movement that embracing DevOps is much more about making a cultural change than about adopting new processes and technologies.

But changing an organization’s existing internal culture can be profoundly difficult. As Peter Drucker famously noted, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” All the best-laid DevOps plans in the world might not make a bit of difference if you can’t get your team to shift its mindset.

As a DevOps leader, managing this cultural change will likely be one of your most frustrating — but ultimately most rewarding — challenges.

Here are five tips from DevOps experts to help manage that change:

1. Cultivate the 5 leadership traits that lead to high performance.
Pick up any self-help book, and you’re sure to read some variation on the mantra that you can’t control whether other people change, you can only control yourself. It might be trite, but it’s true.

Fortunately, as a DevO…

I looked up “Process Design” and found:
“The activity of determining the workflow, equipment needs and implementation requirements for a particular process. Process design typically uses a number of tools including flowcharting, process simulationsoftware and scale models.” 
Hmm… that is good but “So What”?  Why should a service provider care about process?  I have heard some say that process is secondary to automation.  Okay, sounds good, but then we have to consider, “What are we going to automate?”
Every Certified Process Design Engineer knows that when it comes to process we are talking about activity.  The key is that we need just enough process and just enough governance to meet requirements.  Process design contributes to our ability to balance speed and agility with stability.   Having good process design allows for a smooth service belt that delivers value to customers and also gives a service provider the ability to meet business and customer demand at a cost that won’t break t…

Originally Published on the DevOps Institute Site

One of the most interesting trends in DevOps adoption is the evolution of the IT silo into the cross-skilled squad. This is not just a semantical name change. Most IT teams today are comprised of like-skilled individuals such as a Scrum team of developers. The modern squad takes a slightly different approach, is more static than dynamic and is more product-focused than project based. Squads are built around T-shaped professionals –where each member has a specialty competency, but all members have a broad scope of skills across multiple disciplines. A high performing squad essentially has all of the skills needed for the product or feature to which it is assigned and is not generally constrained by the availability of an individual resource. There is enough breadth of knowledge inside and outside the squad to shift more activities to the left so as to allow them to move more quickly and with more agility. While the squad model originate…

Stronger alignment between IT and the business:
Historically IT has not been a participant in helping to create business strategies, it was normally in the role of supporting them. Recently, with the speed of innovation impacting businesses position in the marketplace, IT has been playing a greater role in helping to develop that business strategy. The ITIL framework enables IT to act as a service provider and become a core and more strategic part of the business. Pre-defined processes and best practices from the ITIL framework enable businesses to react quickly to today's rapidly changing technology landscape, focus on innovation and ultimately keep customers satisfied.
Improved service delivery and customer satisfaction:
Event, incident and problem management processes included within the ITIL framework enable businesses to review performance, perform root cause analysis, resolve issues and through problem management, prevent future incidents from occurring and allows us an end t…

IT professionals attending the DevOps FND Certification class offered by the DevOps Campus at ITSM Academy are sometimes surprised to discover that DevOps in not just about Dev and Ops.

The DevOps pipeline and value stream for the continuous delivery of products and services mandates that an integration of requirements and controls be orchestrated in such a way that speed and value are achieved. DevOps extends far beyond software developers and IT operations.

One way to consider the stakeholders for DevOps:

Dev Includes all people involved in developing software products and services including but not exclusive to:
Architects, business representatives, customers, product owners, project managers, quality assurance (QA), testers and analysts, suppliers …Ops Includes all people involved in delivering and managing software products and services including but not exclusive to:
·Information security professionals, systems engineers, system administrators, IT operations engineers, release eng…