As many organizations have adopted agile development and are starting to undertake a DevOps transformation to complete the lifecycle, it is not always easy to keep traditionally alienated back office practitioners engaged. In fact, many organizations go about engaging developers, testers, operators, ... in a way that does not align with the spirit of DevOps. Many enterprise DevOps transformations fail because of this very reason, this session will inform the audience of what it takes to create a strong and sustainable movement within an IT organization in today's world where people who perform different functions that are seemingly at odds can come together in the spirit of improving how work is done and delivered.

The speaker will approach the topic from an anti-patterns perspective, highlighting the symptoms of transformation failure from structural, procedural, and strategic angles and discussing alternative approaches to enable DevOps transformation success.

A Techie's Guide to Improving Operations: Inspirations from Public Transit

There are lots of common challenges between technical operations and public transit operations. Public transit is a staple system in any city's infrastructure that helps to flourish the economy of the city. They have tried-and-tested runbook-type systems in place to deal with standard operations, and how to deal in times of incidents. Sounds pretty much like what technical operations teams have to deal with on a regular basis, right?

In this talk, we present some parallels between operating & running a public transit system that can be implemented at operations teams at software organizations. We will look at technical as well as simple organizational-behvaviour aspects that can be rolled out to increase operational efficiency at organizations, ultimately benefiting for global optimizations - such as minimize downtime, improve systems architecture & infrastructure.

Why is improving Ops important and often left out of agile enablement?

The world of infrastructure & operations is usually not looked at when enabling agile teams from a product management perspective. Most agile enablement process don't look at Ops early. All too often, we see the "throw over the wall, run it & figure it out" behaviour in organizations. The good news is... this behaviour is changing, slowly, but steadily, thanks to the DevOps movement.

There are lots of good literature out there on increasing operational excellence in technical organizations, however, in such a fast world, are leaders getting time to actually learn & reflect on tactics to enable themselves? Can there be easy takeaways that teams can implement starting tomorrow?

Yes they can!

By carefully seeing how a public transit system, such as the TTC, operates, there are lots of areas we can incrementally improve in Ops at our organizations.