Al Gonzalez (Sep 26 2024 at 16:08): Al Gonzalez (Sep 26 2024 at 16:08):First of all, let me say that while I enjoy many of the podcasts, the Kaizen episodes are my favorites and Gerhard's enthusiasm and sense of humor are a treat.
It'd be great if you're team, and especially @Gerhard, would elaborate more on your use of Kaizen for development and DevOps. Most Kaizen coverage seems to be about manufacturing or using some piece of software. I haven't found a lot about using it in a dev team setting.
Maybe get Gerhard to do some blog post?
FlakM (Oct 01 2024 at 17:28):@Al Gonzalez I have exactly the same feelings. I try to channel my inner @Gerhard when I present my work. When it comes to kaizen I recommend Kim's Gen work (Pheonix Project, DevOps handbook and many more). The whole devops movement is very heavily inspired by Toyota, lean manufacturing, Andon Cord and dojos. Can't recommend giving them a read or a listen strongly enough!
Gerhard (Dec 05 2024 at 10:53):Al Gonzalez said:
First of all, let me say that while I enjoy many of the podcasts, the Kaizen episodes are my favorites and Gerhard's enthusiasm and sense of humor are a treat.
It'd be great if you're team, and especially Gerhard, would elaborate more on your use of Kaizen for development and DevOps. Most Kaizen coverage seems to be about manufacturing or using some piece of software. I haven't found a lot about using it in a dev team setting.
Maybe get Gerhard to do some blog post?
Thank you, I really appreciate that!
Both books that @FlakM recommended have been part of my library for many years now, highly recommended. Also worth exploring:
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is my favourite way of understanding the core principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) . It's Not Luck is a great follow-up.
On YouTube, these are good places to continue your reasearch: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jez+humble & https://www.youtube.com/@ContinuousDelivery
And then there is a whole DORA world to explore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps_Research_and_Assessment (note the Accelerate book) & https://dora.dev/research/
Al Gonzalez (Dec 18 2024 at 04:06):Thank you for the references. I'll look into them soon. I have to admit that I've seen DORA in some posts, but I haven't looked into it yet.
Erik Svensson (Jan 09 2025 at 20:49):I finished The Phoenix Project this year and I highly recommend it! The first 3/4 is written like a novel but packed with theory sort of woven into the story which makes it a much easier read than a true factual book.
Daniel Buckmaster (Jan 10 2025 at 02:36):I had read The Phoenix Project a couple of years ago and read The Goal this year. It was really interesting to see the direct inspiration. The Goal was pretty great, and a quick read. I have trouble applying it to software development (as opposed to "IT operations" which Phoenix focuses on).
Raúl (Jan 17 2025 at 20:40):I read both several years ago and highly recommend them. Too bad that so many people nowadays think "devops" is knowing how to run a container on kubernetes or setting up a CI pipeline somewhere. It is so much more than that, and the lessons from that book and other people who tried to teach the world a better way to develop software, ended up lost. We're back to having "devops teams" which is exactly the opposite of what DevOps should be. Again, highly recommend both books.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 17 2025 at 21:46):Oof, I have found my people: folks that know DevOps is not a job title :D
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 17 2025 at 21:52):For internal training, Atlassian used to run a "DevOps simulator"
It would be a classroom of maybe 20 people, all divided into the 5-10 teams that perform critical business functions, from executive level all the way down to engineering and support
It sort of played out a little bit like the boardgame Diplomacy: each turn, each team would perform their function (these were little escape room like puzzles sort of inspired by the business function), and the results would be aggregated
The first run of the simulator would have no information sharing between teams, making certain puzzles harder to complete
Then the second run of the game would have the DevOps-recommended sharing of information upstream and downstream from each team
It'd be very obvious by the end that executives need information from support and engineering in order to perform their function, and vice versa
DevOps is an organisation-wide culture, and it fails just like Agile does if only some teams embrace it
Daniel Buckmaster (Jan 18 2025 at 23:16):@Ron Waldon-Howe that company-wide simulation sounds really interesting, is there any public info about it? I can't find much from a quick duck.
Ron Waldon-Howe (Jan 18 2025 at 23:25):@Daniel Buckmaster it wasn't Atlassian's own thing, it seemed like we hired or licenced it from some consultants, but nothing specific about them shows up when I search our internal stuff :S
And none of the public search results for it looks familiar either, but they are in the ballpark
https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=devops%20simulator
Last updated: Apr 04 2025 at 01:15 UTC