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Kill the Restructure, Says Dr. Cherry Vu and Rob England [VIDEO]

Editor’s Note: The chapter, “Kill the Restructure” is included in Epic Failures in DevSecOps, Volume 2, which is available for free download.

We see too many enterprises assuming one of the first steps of DevOps is a reorganization. DevOps isn’t about org structures. — Dr. Cherry Vu

Interview with Dr. Cherry Vu and Rob England, with host Justin Miller.


Excerpt from the Chapter 9, “Kill the Restructure” from the book Epic Failures in DevSecOps.

Work is a complex system. It’s an organic soup of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, mood, vision, personalities… There are no crisp inputs and outputs, just energy and activity in a network. You don’t know how to change it. Nobody knows, no matter how much you pay them. Stop pretending that anybody knows what an optimal organizational structure is until they’ve tried it. It is a patronizing, even arrogant, fallacy that anyone can know what a better structure is in advance. It’s the nature of complexity. We can only experiment in increments. Structure must be emergent, not imposed.

Similarly, culture is an emergent property of the complex work system. It is an output not an input. Change the attitudes and behaviors, then that becomes culture. Culture doesn’t come in a tube to be inserted. What’s more, we managers/ consultants can’t change culture. The community has to change itself, and want to do so. We can only change the conditions under our control and see what effect that has, then see what culture emerges. And that effect is unpredictable. Again, nobody knows. You have to suck it and see. Hence small steps.

For Example

Look at DevOps as an example. The point of DevOps is to span silos, not to change one set of silos into different ones. Changing from North/South slices into East/ West slices are (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Sonatype Blog authored by Mark Miller. Read the original post at: https://blog.sonatype.com/kill-the-restructure-says-dr.-cherry-vu-and-rob-england-video