Title: Communities of practice in large scale DevOps transformations

Description:

Swisscom started its DevOps Journey late 2014 - over enthusiastic and infected by the books, blogs and success stories of various DevOps leaders. But how do you transfer a company with round about 4’000 IT specialists, hierarchical structures and legacy-monoliths? How do you centrally organize a change if the target structure is decentralized and self-organizing? How can you spread good practices and amplify them beyond team boundaries?
I’d like to talk about our DevOps journey – from first bottom-up pilot teams, early success stories, how we involved top management and how we plan to scale the change in the future. A key element in our story are communities of practices. We started such communities on different levels with different focus. Shipit days on team level, communities on department level to discuss technically specific cross-team aspects and guilds on enterprise level to foster good practices, share knowledge and bunch energy to resolve common seen impediments. To benefit from outside views, we also founded a Meetup Community to exchange with other DevOps Enthusiasts from the area. It is amazing to see what developed out of these communities and how much energy is involved in these topics.
You can’t get DevOps by buying a tool - because it’s about culture. Sounds easy and compelling. In this talk I would like to propose a way how to get such a DevOps culture in a big legacy company. I would like to share the experience we made so far and the next steps we intend to take. And I would like to share my conviction that communities of practice play a central role in a large scale DevOps transformation. I thought that this might be interesting for other participants as the talk is about a large-scale transformation of a big Telco company with lots of legacy and “netnear” IT infrastructure.