Presentation: Who Broke Prod? - Growing Teams Who Can Fail Without Fear
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What You’ll Learn
- Listen about the culture of blame, what it is and how it impacts a team’s performance.
- Learn what are some practical things to do in order to eliminate the culture of blame.
- Hear how to transition into a DevOps role to achieve better results in your team.
Abstract
In a world where we can deploy software and infrastructure changes within seconds, it’s reasonably easy to break stuff. When the inevitable bad stuff happens, humans tend to look for someone to blame. Research has shown that the most productive teams are those who don’t have to fear blame. On high-performing teams, people feel safe taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them – so how do you build an environment where it’s OK to fail? In this talk we’ll explore the factors that contribute to psychological safety on a delivery team. We’ll look at some of the steps that leaders and team members can take to foster a culture of blameless failure that encourages innovation and collaboration. We’ll look at soft-skills, CI/CD practices, retrospective processes and tooling that can help you to build a culture of trust and ownership within your own team.
What is your talk about?
It's quite common for me to come across groups of people who instinctively point the finger of blame at each other. And we know from some of the great research around DevOps that the most effective teams are teams that trust each other, and can collaborate together and where you've got a culture of blame that stands in the way of success. The talk is really my experience and some tangible changes that you can make, either as a leader or as a team member, to help breakdown that culture of blame.
What are some specific things that you are going to talk about?
I am going to talk about blameless postmortems, but trying not to talk about the scary bit of postmortem and talk more about all the good stuff that can come out of it. I'm going to talk about some little subtle things that you might not think about around the CI/CD processes, while everybody is rushing to go and embrace continuous delivery and use all these wonderful tools which integrate their development processes, maybe they're contributing to the blame culture by ensuring that there's something in the middle that you can blame rather than working together to solve a problem? I talk about the culture of experimentation, what can you do as a leader to help foster a culture of experimentation. The more that we experiment, the braver we become at preparing for failure. And that can be small things such as allowing developers time to experiment with something entirely new, to go and play with a shiny piece of technology that you’ve wanted to for a while.
Who's the audience you're talking to?
It's definitely targeted at teams members and team leaders; people who have been working in a team and can see that there are things that could change, that you could do better.
When you say team leaders, are you talking about individual contributors or management types?
Both. As somebody who has been a developer and then has moved up through the ranks, I believe that for a team to be effective you don't necessarily need a manager but you need some people, whether those are your technical leaders or people leaders, some people on your team who help the team to improve. In an effective DevOps team, everybody is helping the team to improve. Your natural leaders, your senior developers, your technical architects and software development managers.
In your abstract you talk about psychological safety. How do you build that in your team?
The whole talk is around these real things that you can do to make changes .Regarding psychological safety, I talk a bit around retrospective techniques. Even if you're not running Scrum, to reflect regularly, providing some ideas of things you can do in your retrospectives to make the environment safer to provide honest and constructive feedback. For example, for teams who are finding it hard to talk honestly in front of each other, to use an online tool. Remote teams use an online tool to conduct their retrospectives. Even if you are not remote, using an online tool to capture the talking points and talk from there. This gets over the first hurdle of people being brave enough to raise their concerns.
What do you want someone who comes to your talk to walk away with?
I want them to have a list of things they want to try, and to feel inspired to go and make a couple of small changes on their team which could help eliminate the culture of blame.
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