Experimentation

Ben Madley, 29 Sep 2019

I’ve been reading at John Cutler’s blog and Twitter for about a year. Recently he published “So You Want to Fix Something?”, a blog post that reads like a Twitter thread (because it is). In it he covers tactics for making change to an organisation. I wish I’d read it before learning the lessons the hard way.

We’ve just had DevOps Days London 2019. The most interesting part was a discussion on DevOps in a non-Dev world, how do you bring the introduction of DevOps ideas to a company who’s primary function isn’t producing software. My suggestion is to make it as safe as possible for whoever will need to approve your change.

1. Make whatever you want to change as small as possible. Make it inarguably harmless.
2. Phrase it as a trial. It’s a lot easier to approve a trial than a new change.
3. If you are hoping to get some business benefit, then get backing from the business.
4. Measure what you are hoping to change (cycle time, employee happiness, defects) and show that you have improved it.

This gives the approver the easiest time accepting your change and makes it much more easy to try it out. If it doesn’t work out then you haven’t lost anything. If it does, then you have momentum for moving forward.