Don't go DevOps with a big bang

When I see organisations move to agile ways of working using a big bang approach I always wonder to myself just how profound a grasp of Agile they have.

And when I hear analysts recommending such an approach it is hard to understand where they come from.

One of the characters on this blog Chokey the Chimp takes an interest in so called research from the analyst and vendor communities and this recent article was deserving of such attention.

Without devoting the time to deconstruct the statistical validity of it, we can already see that the conclusions are dangerous advice to any organisation.

    To get the most out of devOps, go all in, survey suggests
    A survey of IT professionals, commissioned by New Relic, suggests that a partial adoption of a devOps strategy may be counterproductive...
    "The message is clear: effective DevOps requires an all-in approach," New Relic wrote

It has always been the role of analysts to heat up and hurry up the market, in order to feed their host organisms, the vendors. Here we see that at work again. Pump up the volume.

It's awful advice. When adopting new ways of working it is essential to move incrementally, iteratively; experimenting and exploring. New ways of working are always complex systems: a big-bang change can only end badly.

Every first step in new human systems will result in failures. We must ensure those failures have a small blast radius by moving forward in smaller steps.

Be agile about going Agile, including DevOps.

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