"You do not have to be Albert Einstein to handle your IT assignments 'On Time' (i.e. To Schedule), 'At Cost' (i.e. To Budget) and 'To Specifications' (i.e. To Scope)"
Yaacov (Jack) Bar-Tor
Information Technology
YBT Services Pty Ltd
Know where you are starting
When we first join new organizations, we go through a learning process, discovering the mores and acceptable behaviours of that organization, be it a new company, a sports team, or the PTA. It’s common to get different answers to questions like "Why are we doing X this way?" from different people. When we hope to change the prevailing culture of the group, we need to assess the current state of that culture, and ask all of the questions about why we’re doing X the way we are.
The one question you must ask is "What is our primary business goal?" You need to know what people have decided is the motivating factor for the business as they know it. If the organization’s leadership has done a good job of communicating the organization’s goals, you’ll find most people are on point. It’s not uncommon, though, to hear some folks claim that the business goal is "We’re a content company; we produce awesome content for our users" and others "We’re an ads-placement company; we sell ads to make money for our advertisers." Or maybe, "We provide a stable application for our users" versus "We are driving innovation and leading the competition in new features." Are these goals mutually exclusive? No, but they represent a difference in viewpoint that will colour people’s actions and decisions when it comes to the products they work on.
In an ideal situation, you’ll have some sort of consensus. Even if you have two related goals, you’re doing mostly OK. The comedy of errors starts when you have several divergent ideas of what the company is actually trying to accomplish. The reasons for this often include poor communication from management as to what the company is driving toward. It’s also possible that fuzzy goals like "serving the customer in the best way possible" are different for different teams in your organization, especially if they have different "customers."
Now that you know the goal of your business, you can take this knowledge and focus your DevOps cultural change toward enabling this business and working toward this goal.