Where there are people, there are politics. Despite negative views many engineers have of office politics, they play an important role in our organizations. Politics is how we, as groups of people, make decisions. If we want to influence decision-making in our organizations, then we need to understand organizational politics.

When we talk about devops, we talk about building a culture where we collaborate across boundaries in our organizations. To get to this point, we often need to change the way that our organizations make decisions across these silos. It’s not just culture that we need to impact! The ever-increasing complexity of the software systems that we build and maintain require an increasing amount of joint activity and better tools for collaborative decision-making in our organizations.

In this talk, I’ll discuss:

• How to identify political structures and learn how decisions get made in your organization
• Common political structures in technical organizations
• Tools for healthy collective decision-making