Atlassian Senior Solutions Engineer, Ken Urban sits down with Atlassian Sales Director, Sean O'Sullivan to discuss the benefits of using Atlassian solutions with DevOps.
Sean O'Sullivan: Hello everyone. I would like to thank you all for joining our podcast today to take a deeper dive into DevOps solutions with Atlassian. My name is Sean O'Sullivan with the Atlassian team at Carahsoft Technology Corporation and I'm here today with Atlassian's Ken Urban, Senior Solutions Engineer. Thank you for joining us today Ken.
Ken Urban: Thank you for having me here today, Sean.
Sean O'Sullivan: Excited to have you. The team at Carahsoft often receives a lot of questions from our government customers asking about how Atlassian can ease the pain of shifting to DevOps and the benefits to using Atlassian technology to make their agencies work smarter and faster. I guess I'll start off with my first question here. We often run into different interpretations of what agencies actually consider a DevOps transformation so how would you describe a DevOps transformation?
Ken Urban: Yeah, absolutely. A DevOps transformation is a process by which you can change both the development and operation cultures within your agency to align with the new philosophy rooted in Agile methodologies and continuous delivery. How you achieve that is very different for each team within your agency. It will typically involve significant organizational and cultural changes, some of which might be difficult to achieve. There's no standard for DevOps transformation so I'm not surprised that you run into a dozen different definitions of it a day, because as I mentioned it's a philosophy. You need to take that philosophy and mold it to your own team or agency culture and find what works best for you. It might be that you can do Agile development but you can't do continuous delivery into production systems due to supporting a mission critical system. That's okay. You can still do DevOps though.
With that in mind there a few basic tenants that I see in most DevOps transformations. The first is that you're going to need to do your homework. Are you groaning yet? You need to know what to change and why though. So what's broken or not working like it should in other words. Maybe the answer to that is nothing. Okay so, what do you want to improve upon? Was there some objective that you wish you could've made? Maybe that production release with a really cool feature didn't quite make it out in time to have that impact that you'd hoped it would, that right there is your reason for change. As part of your homework you're also going to want to arm yourself with examples of teams that are working similarly and having success. Preferably they'll be teams that are either organizationally near you or very well known.
The second is to build a coalition. It's impossible to effect a cultural change by yourself and almost impossible to change policies and procedures unless you have a specific authority to do so. Rarely will a single person or a team have both. That makes coalition building critical. Find or convince others to be advocates for your cause. In addition to starting and to helping you start the process within your team these individuals will serve as change agents to bring your philosophy to the larger organization to an even broader audience.
The third is to start small and then scale the transformation. Massive across the board changes will either fail outright or be resisted to the point of uselessness. Small wins become critical here. Prove out that a change works and provides benefit. For example, get the operations team involved in the release process or get the development team involved in outages so they can see and feel the pain that operation has on a daily basis. The point in either case is to slowly change your culture.
Sean O'Sullivan: So, it's interesting that you actually bring up scale there. With our government customers we're seeing deployments supporting 10 users to 10,000 users. So obviously scale is an important discussion topic for us. What does scaling DevOps transformation entail?
Ken Urban: Yep. So scaling here is really more about institutionalizing the culture that you've developed. You take it from one team and you spread it across your entire organization or agency. This is where you're going to need your top cover or your senior management in other words. It's important here to have an advocate who can speak across organizations on your behalf to show other senior leaders why they should consider changing their organization's culture to be more like yours. Note I said more like and not to be the same culture. Don't force your culture onto others. Let them take the same journey you just did but with your support. Help them avoid the pitfalls that you ran into but don't dictate to them. Nobody likes to be dictated to.
This is also where you start to consider things like standardizing on methodologies and tool sets. Though again, I'd caution not to force your tools or policies onto others. An easier solution is to make your tool set and policies available for consumption. For example, invite the other teams to join your Jira. Document your policies and procedures, et cetera in confluence and make them visible outside your team. Be as transparent as you can be while still respecting good security practices. More often than not, other teams will follow your lead and use the same tooling and adapt your processes to their own needs. Of course, some teams will have unique needs or reasons for doing it differently and that's entirely okay too.
Metrics also become very critical at this point. Management will look for terms like key performance indicators, KPIs, among other things. Whatever methodology or terminology they want to see the important point here is to be able to prove that your way is better than the old way. It's hard to argue with your team being able to release more features with less downtime when you put that into a chart in front of a senior leader.
Sean O'Sullivan: Alright, those are a lot of good pointers. Are there any other aspects so of the DevOps transformation that you would say maybe are commonly overlooked when it comes to scaling?
Ken Urban: Absolutely. I'd say one of the biggest is failing to plan for the rapid growth. Existing tooling might've been scaled to only handle a few teams or maybe even one. And DevOps, as you know, is heavily reliant on good tooling for many things. Plan ahead and choose performance tools would be some good advice. Atlassian has built our data center products through exactly this problem including scaling these tools with your organization's transformation.
The next biggest issue I see is one I've mentioned several times already and that's forcing your culture, tools, or processes onto others. As a manager when I saw something that worked for another team my first thought was, "Oh great, let's do that and everything will be cool." But you have to take a step back and think. Very quickly you have to remind yourself what works for them might not fit exactly with the people that you have because you're different. That's very common. Everybody does it and not everybody even realizes they're doing it. It's far better to examine why the other team was successful or if you're the other team show why that works for you and then incorporate parts that make sense. Basically this comes down to DevOps being a philosophy and not a standard. There are innumerable ways to do DevOps the right way. The only way to know what is the right way is by asking your team, "Does this work for us?"
Sean O'Sullivan: Okay, great. So let's briefly review here the tips for scaling DevOps transformation. Are these more directed at specific teams, your IT guys, your HR guys, your business guys, et cetera, or are these more general?
Ken Urban: Absolutely. These are more general tips but there are some team specific. Again, the first is don't force it. A DevOps transformation at both the team and organization level needs to be organic. It's going to start slow and then speed up massively much like a train. Plan for massive growth of your support systems. Don't let them fall over by failing to plan ahead. Don't be on the Jira server instance when you've got 100,000 customers for example beyond data center. Atlassian has a lot of documentation on scaling our solutions with your organization and I highly suggest if you're using our software to use that documentation, plan ahead. Show results early and often. Small wins are great and they keep everyone motivated to keep that train moving. Most importantly, you want to share those wins with others. That's how you start building the momentum at the organization level and building those coalitions that I talked about earlier.
Finally, get help if you need it. The internet is a great resource but sometimes a person who has been through that journey will be an invaluable resource. Atlassian has a lot of experience in this area and we are overjoyed to share it with others. We have team playbooks, we have Technical Account Managers or TAM's who can provide, help themselves or bring in other Atlassian's for a quick chat. We also have an extensive network of solution partners who we can recommend if you need a more hands on approach. The point is you aren't alone on this journey. Don't be afraid to phone a friend.
Sean O'Sullivan: Alright, Ken. So I'm noticing most if not all of these tips they're focusing a lot on people and culture and not necessarily the technology, right? So, can you speak to that a bit more? What is it about people and culture that's making them the pivotal piece of the DevOps transformation?
Ken Urban: Yeah. As a technologist, this hurts me a little bit to say but it's very relevant here. In DevOps the technology is largely irrelevant. DevOps can be done with almost any technology. The important facet in DevOps is the way of thinking. That's what makes the people and the culture so important. It's a fundamentally different way to look at and think about how to deliver a product or a service. So, without altering the culture, and thus the people's way of thinking. It doesn't matter how awesome your technology is you're not going to get anything done. The bottom line is you have to get people to think along the same lines.
Sean O'Sullivan: So, you're with Atlassian and I'm on the Carahsoft team that supports Atlassian. We're discussing Atlassian's solutions like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and others every day with government customers who are developing their DevOps strategy. How would you say that lasting solutions help agencies when it comes to scaling DevOps?
Ken Urban: Yeah so, any successful DevOps implementation includes people, process, and technology in that perfect trifecta and the hardest part of that transformation as we've been talking about is always involving your people and your culture. In fact, most DevOps transformations fail to poor communication, failure to collaborate, lack of buy in, and lack of accountability. So, Atlassian understands that and has created an immersive DevOps simulator to help teams understand the cultural impact of DevOps and to develop a common shared language for their implementation. The idea is for your teams to walk away with a better understanding of the gaps in your current approach and learn new ways to improve upon it.
For tooling Atlassian has a fully integrated software development life cycle tool set, IT and project management tools that can help your organization to succeed on your journey. We provide a Jira data center to help software developers, operations teams, HR training, and pretty much anybody have a more agile workflow. Jira Service Desk can enable your IT and customer service teams by providing automation and ticket deflection capabilities. Confluence data center can be used for knowledge sharing across the organization and Bitbucket and Bamboo can be used to support and encourage a more modern and continuous delivery system. Since our tools don't dictate process, we have cultivated a robust partner ecosystem to ensure that you'll have the right DevOps processes in place and that they're properly configured in the tool. We also have a technical account manager whose job it is to guide you on that journey and to help you to find the right resources to utilize.
Sean O'Sullivan: Alright, so we've gone over several tips, tricks and advice today when it comes to DevOps and scaling with DevOps. I guess if you had to sum it all up in a nice little bow what's the main takeaway you would want listeners to glean from the podcast today?
Ken Urban: Yeah, I'd have to say keep in mind you're not alone on the journey. Remember, DevOps is a philosophy and not a standard. And I often get asked, "How do you know when I'm done with my DevOps transformation?" And the answer is you're never truly done because there's always going to be some new way of doing things and new technologies. In fact, one of the philosophies of DevOps is continuous improvement. That's not just for the product but also how you build it and Atlassian we embrace that and we want to be there to help you.
Sean O'Sullivan: Alright, well this was a lot of great information today, Ken. Just real quick though, where do you suggest our listeners might want to go to learn more about DevOps information for government agencies?
Ken Urban: Well, I think the Atlassian website has a really great set of resources available at our DevOps site including a lot of playbooks that are free.
Sean O'Sullivan: Yeah. And I think I'd also recommend visiting the Carahsoft Atlassian website to get some more government agency specific focused information when it comes to Atlassian solutions and what they can do for the DevOps scaling.
Ken Urban: Absolutely.
Sean O'Sullivan: So these are all great suggestions. Ken I do appreciate you taking the time today to discuss what can obviously be a challenging transformation for users as they continue to get smarter in this agile world. That concludes our discussion today though. For our listeners, please check out Ken's suggestions and the resources that we have located on this podcast landing page and contact us anytime via email atlassian@carahsoft.com or you can give us a call, 833-547-2468. Thanks everyone.
Ken Urban: Thank you.