Elevator Pitch
Adopting DevOps puts new challenges on IT ops whether it be managing new tools, or having to learn new skills to enable success. This often leads managers and individual contributors curious how they’ll adapt in the new framework. This talk touches on existing transferrable skills and ones to grow.
Description
In this talk I’ll outline how I’ve seen the role of Operations professionals evolve to support a wide range of initiatives, but none more impactful than DevOps. I’ll touch on my own personal experiences handling operations for a large multinational vendor as well as my time spent on the vendor side.
I’ll discuss a variety of strategies operations professionals and their leaders can deploy in order to more quickly and successfully integrate into a DevOps organization. Core strength areas that I’ll cover are: - Comprehension of complex systems - Application of their natural resourcefulness - Ability to adapt new tools and methodologies.
Finally I’ll touch on key focus areas that operations professionals need to focus on improving as they go forward. These key areas are: - Increasing operational transparency to entire organization - Becoming comfortable with postmortems and adopting a blameless culture - Asking the right questions to get requirements from rest of team. - Setting realistic expectations and avoiding burnout.
Attendees should walk away with confidence in how they can apply their current strengths to a DevOps framework as well as specific focus areas for improvement that will make large impacts as the organization matures.
Notes
As a long time operations professional I worked in numerous environments where adaption to agile development teams led us to fundamentally change how we handled delivering IT services. This aligned well with what we now call DevOps and this talk is where I summarize some of the skills and gaps I see in Operations professionals looking to adopt and contribute to a DevOps model.