Organizational Learning through Trolling

Abstract:

Learning, from both an individual and organizational perspective, is one of the pillars of DevOps; there are unorthodox changes to team and culture that can move your organization forward. At first pass, this may seem like it requires classroom settings, formal structure (trust falls), and frameworks for learning. Those things may all work, but the heart of organizational learning and problem solving become part of your team’s culture by constantly striving for new ways to look at problems -- including trying to come up with the worst solutions possible to problems, playing devil’s advocate, and sometimes delaying decisions until absolutely required. In other words, you can build a learning culture by trolling your team, and expecting to be trolled.

Techniques discussed in this presentation will apply to teams of all sizes, both from the startup and enterprise world. You can start with a bottom-up approach for improvement and learning; even if you’re not doing rockstar-ninja automation and deploying 23 ½ times a day. This talk will not focus on tools, but rather procedural and cultural improvements that can make your team better.

Speaker:

Michael Stahnke has been interested in devops since before he knew it had a name. He is specifically interested in devops outside of the start-up and high-tech sectors. Michael currently leads the Engineering Services Organization at Puppet Labs, where he was previously the Community Manager and originally built out the Release Engineering team.

He came to Puppet Labs from Caterpillar, Inc. where he was an Infrastructure Architect, system administration team lead, and open source evangelist. Michael also helped get the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository off the ground in 2006, and is the author of Pro OpenSSH (Apress, 2005).