Talk: Preaching to the UnConverted
Speakers directory
Speaker:
jimbobbirnie
Talk description
Title:
Preaching to the UnConverted
Short synopsis:
Most of us understand the benefits of continuous delivery. But what if you have to work in an environment where the business just sees continuous delivery as continuous risk? I'll give practical tips on preaching to the unconverted to get the buy in you need to make a positive culture shift.
Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):
I started my career in software engineering in the late 1990s when test driven development was something you studied but never did, a pipeline was something that carried oil and agile was only ever written with a small a. Those days consisted of frustration about lack of clarity over requirements and whether they had been met, powerlessness because of our lack of involvement in business decisions and an overwhelming belief that there had to be a better way. I joined a start up in 2005 which was the first time that I felt I could really make a difference. For a few years everything was great until the company grew and started accumulating legacy and technical debt (even if we were unaware of the term). Even in that brave new world it took a few years for management and technologists to be convinced of the merits of TDD and CI. By the time I left that startup in 2014 we had improved our process to the extent that, looking back, I would say that we were in the later stages of Agile Transformation. When I became a consultant I quickly realised that I had left behind a far from dysfunctional organisation. In my early engagements in the banking world it was obvious that our clients need to embrace Agile and DevOps. It wasn’t necessarily clear what their best path was and it was far from clear how to get stakeholders to buy in to these ideas in the short timescales available to us. Achieving buy in from the interested parties is the first and often hardest step in a transformation journey. Business owners are obsessed with perceived velocity of feature delivery. Developers can be sceptical having experienced previous ill understood attempts at transformation. Test teams, security groups and infrastructure teams often fail to see the opportunity, only seeing existential risk to their positions. I will draw from my 20 years of experience in the software engineering world to give examples and practical tips on how to get the vital buy in to effect real change in your organisation.
Max size: 5000 chars
Tags:
Speaker directory:
Listed in directory
Not listed
Speakers directory