DevOpsDays Charlotte 2018

Banks are the perfect storm of DevOps anti-patterns where Technical, Organizational and Cultural barriers are all stacked against you.
Cultural sprawl is huge. You don’t have to unlock and influence just one culture; you will encounter a half dozen. As an example, the top 4 banks (Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Citi, & Bank of America) were 35 separate companies in 1990. They are an average of 175 years old.
In most organizations of almost any size, there are challenges with compliance, tech sprawl, obsolete technologies, and bloated processes. The delivery chain is often split among 3-4 organizations. Culturally, there is fear of change, group overlap and protectionism.
It sounds hopeless, right?
Through long, painful journeys, we learned principles and techniques you can use to weather your storms. These techniques evolved over 10 years in transformations which crossed 3 banks and 4 distinct large-scale transformations. Each transformation was unique, but the principles were universal. They apply to organizations of all sizes, ages and industries.
This talk will detail the principles of how we navigated and influenced cultures of organizations to achieve massively scaled DevOps transformations. We’ll talk about the importance of Leadership and why it is necessary to transcend the cultural challenges in any size organization. Leaders must be willing to go against the grain every day while providing vision, inspiration and protection. We’ll touch on Servant Leadership, Transformational Leadership, Fear of Change, Motivation and Trust.
We’ll explain the “Why” of those principles. From there, we’ll go down a path of applying those principles to actions you can take immediately to begin creating collaborative DevOps cultures.
We’ll discuss how to grow a coalition, anchor behavior, and defend your efforts from those threatened by them. The techniques help incubate your transformation until there is enough critical mass to make it tough to derail.
The three action areas we’ll discuss to help you successfully scale DevOps are: Alliances, Data, & Startup Mentality.
1)Alliances: We’ll discuss how to identify, create and leverage alliances. We’ll show how this helps bypass resistance, plot your strategy and keep your assembly line of on-boards moving.
2)Data: We’ll show how to use data to prove success, communicate weekly, and keep your execs asking for more.
3)Startup Mentality: This keeps your team focused and passionate. I told my teams: “Pretend you are a small company inside a big one. Every day measure our contribution and expect to fold if you don’t deliver.” Acting like a startup means being hungry every day, delivering in increments, focusing on just a couple efforts at a time (80/20), and pivoted rapidly. Deliver small, consistent wins to build a track record and credibility and trust. Focus on customers and their experience.
We struggled, slipped and hit brick walls, but one thing kept us going. Every member of our team believed that what we were doing was the most important thing in the world to our companies. This gave us the courage to keep pushing.
Was it worth it? Yes, every minute of it. We ultimately automated over 800 applications at Bank of America. It can be done in any organization.