The Three Ways of DevOps

The three ways are one of the underlying principles of what some people call DevOps (and what other people call “doing stuff right”). Read on for a description of each approach, which when combined, will help you drive performance improvements, higher quality services, and reduce operational costs.

1. Systems thinking.

Systems thinking involves taking into account the entire flow of a system. This means that when you’re establishing requirements or designing improvements to a structure, process, or function, you don’t focus on a single silo, department, or element. This principle is reflected in the “Toyota way” and in the excellent book “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox. By utilising systems thinking, you should never pass a defect downstream, or increase the speed of a non-bottleneck function. In order to properly utilise this principle, you need to seek to achieve a profound understanding of the complete system.

It is also necessary to avoid 100% utilisation of any role in a process; in fact it’s important to bring utilisation below 80% in order to keep wait times acceptable. See the graph below.

utilisation vs wait time

2. Amplification of feedback loops.

Any (good) process has feedback loops – loops that allow corrections to be made, improvements to be identified and implemented, and those improvements to be measured, checked and re-iterated. For example, in a busy restaurant kitchen, delivering meatballs and pasta, if the guy making the tomato sauce has added too much salt, it’ll be picked up by someone tasting the dish before it gets taken away by the waiter, but by then the dish is ruined. Maybe it should be picked up by the chef making the meatballs, before it’s added to the pasta? Maybe it should be picked up at hand-off between the two chefs? How about checking it before it even leaves the tomato sauce-guy’s station? By shortening the feedback loop, mistakes are found faster, rectified easier, and the impact on the whole system – and the product – is lower.

3. Continuous Improvement.

A culture of continual experimentation, improvement, taking risks and learning from failure will trump a culture of tradition and safety every time. It is only by mastering skills and taking ownership of mistakes that we can take those risks without incurring costly failures.

Repetition and practice is the key to mastery, and by considering every process as an evolutionary stage rather than a defined method, it is possible to continuously improve and adapt to even very dramatic change.

It is important to allocate time to improvement, which could be a function of the 20% “idle” time of resources if you’ve properly managed the utilisation of a role. Without allocating time to actually focus on improvement, inefficiencies and flaws will continue and amplify well beyond the “impact” of reducing utilisation of said resource.

By utilising the three ways as above, by introducing faults into systems to increase resilience, and by fostering a culture that rewards risk taking while owning mistakes, you’ll drive higher quality outcomes, higher performance, lower costs and lower stress!

For my presentation on the Three Ways, click here. Feel free to use, adapt, and feed back to me 🙂

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