Lean

Presenting at #DevOpsDays #Nashville

Very excited to be presenting an Ignite talk at #DevOpsDays #Nashville (October 17-18, 2017): Tactical Advice For Strategic Change In A Brownfield

It’s only a 5 minute presentation (20 slides; slides change every 15 seconds), but I’m stoked about it. It’s going to be my first DevOps talk that has absolutely nothing to do with SQL Server; finally starting to go in a new direction, and focus on Culture, Lean, and Sharing. It’s a great little conference, and I’m grateful to go back for my second year (this time as a speaker).

Now, I just got to develop the slide deck J

2017-08-21 by Blogging is FUN! DevOps Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

5 #DevOps Books I plan to finish this year

New Year.  Resolutions, etc. 🙂

I’m notoriously bad about starting a book and never finishing it, particularly when it’s a technical book.  My goal this year is to finish the following 5 books:

The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

Gene Kim is perhaps best known for his novel “The Phoenix Project”, which lays out the fundamental precepts for DevOps.  The Handbook (by Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, and Jez Humble) gets great reviews, and I think it does a good job of translating theory into practice.  I’ve only finished about a third of it, so I’ve still got a lot of reading left to do, but I hope to finish it soon.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

This one might be a little easier to cheat on my goal; I’ve already read most of it.  It’s a collection of papers written by various SRE’s within Google, and gives some great insights into their vision of applying developmental principles to operation problems.  While it could be argued that the SRE model is distinct from DevOps, there’s enough overlap that it makes sense to apply these techniques to my DevOps study.

Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story

This one’s a bit of a stretch for most DevOps folks, but if you think of it an approach to personal continual improvements, then it makes sense why this book belongs in a DevOps collection.  I started reading this one last year, and quickly off the bandwagon.  My goal is to try and finish it by the middle of the year, and hopefully begin to apply some of the principles to my personal and professional challenges.

The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources in the Cloud

I heard John Willis at DevOpsDays Nashville this year, and he recommended following and reading John Allspaw (among other people); the second edition of this book is coming out this year, so I’ll probably wait till it arrives.  While I don’t do much with either web or cloud development, the principles of scaling is relevant to all kinds of applications.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

Damon Edwards actually recommended this book during a webcast I saw a couple of months ago, and while it’s not a technical book, it speaks to the art of transforming a large, complex organization with entrenched policies into a nimble, responsive team.  Brownfield to greenfield (with military references).
2017-01-11 by Book Reviews Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

The Implicit Optimism of #DevOps

One of my favorite podcasts lately is DevOps Café; John Willis and Damon Edwards do a great job of talking about the various trends in IT management, and have really opened my eyes to a lot of different ways of thinking about problems in enterprise systems administration. On a recent podcast, John interviewed Damon about his #DOES15 presentation, “DevOps Kaizen: Practical Steps to Start & Sustain a Transformation“. During that conversation, Damon mentioned a phrase that really resonated with me: Be Good at Getting Better.

At the heart of the DevOps philosophy is the desire to improve delivery of services through removal of cultural blockages. Success isn’t measured by the amount of code pushed out the door or the number of releases; it’s the ability to continuously improve over time. Companies that experiment (even with ideas that don’t work) learn a different way to approach any problem that they face. The freedom to experiment means that failure is not an outcome; it’s a method of improvement.

The optimism of that appeals to me; I think if you’re focusing on continuous improvement, then you’ve implicitly accepted two fundamental principles of optimism:

  1. Change is necessary for growth, and
  2. Things CAN improve (you just need to figure out how).

There’s some beauty in that; if you’re an organization facing overwhelming technical debt, it’s not uncommon to sink into a spiral of despair, where changes are infrequent for fear of breaking something. Mistrust breeds, as organizations point fingers at other teams for “failing to deliver”. You quit working toward solutions, and instead focus on fighting fires and maintaining some sort of desperate last stand.

You’re better than that.

DevOps is a cultural change; it’s an optimistic philosophy focused on changing IT culture while being open to different strategies for doing so. If you can commit to Be Good at Getting Better, you can change. It may be slow, it may be frustrating, but every day is an opportunity to incrementally move the ball forward in delivering quality business services. The trick is not to focus on where to begin, but simply to begin.


2016-09-07 by DevOps SQLServerPedia Syndication 0

Steel City SQL Users Group–March 18, 2014– @SteelCitySQL

Next Tuesday, I’m loading up Big Blue, and driving over to Birmingham to present at the Steel City SQL Users Group.  I’ll be talking about the Agile DBA.  Should be fun!

http://www.steelcitysql.org/

Featured Presentation

The Agile DBA: Managing your To-Do List

Speaker: Stuart Ainsworth

Summary: Agile development is all the rage, but how do the principles apply to database administrators? This presentation will introduce the basics of the Agile Manifesto, and explain how they can be applied to non-development IT work, such as database administration, maintenance, and support. We’ll cover scrum (one of the most popular development methodologies) and kanban, and identify some of the common struggles with implementing them in an organization. This is an interactive discussion; please bring your tales of success and your horror stories.

About Stuart: Stuart Ainsworth (MA, MEd) is a manager working in the realm of financial information security. Over the past 15 years, he’s worked as a research analyst, a report writer, a DBA, a programmer, and a public speaking professor. In his current role, he’s responsible for the maintenance of a data analysis operation that processes several hundred million rows of data per day.

2014-03-14 by Conferences Professional Development SQL SQLServerPedia Syndication User Groups 0

MaTT: You have to start somewhere

So, January came and went, and no post from me.  I continue to suffer from writer’s block, but I’ve finally cobbled together enough ideas that I feel like I can put a couple of quick posts out there.  I’m still struggling with learning how to manage a technical team (MaTT) as opposed to being a technical person, but here’s another concept I’m beginning to grasp.

You have to start somewhere.

When I began managing my team, I was tempted to rush in and save the day.  I know where a lot of the problems are, and I know which ones are big, and which ones are not.  I kept thinking that if I could just motivate the team to start attacking the problem, then we’d be sitting pretty in a year.

I was wrong.

Most people are already motivated to do their jobs; if they’re not, then they’re in the wrong position, and it’s hurting them as well as hurting the company.  What a team is usually looking for in a manager is to help them make priority decisions, and to back them up when they need things to change.   Here’s the conundrum: Technical people often (logically) focus on changing the things that hurt them the most.  Your DBA may say “I keep having to babysit this query for the boss because it’s slow, and it’s slow because the developers don’t know how to normalize a database; can we refactor everything?”.  Your developers may say “If we had more time to rebuild everything, we could fix that query; can we hire another person or put these features on hold so we could tune everything?”.  Your boss may say “We need to make a profit; what’s the most cost-effective way to manage our database architecture moving forward?”

If you focus your energy on addressing the technical issues without giving consideration to the profitability of your company, you’re spinning your wheels.  However, you MUST figure out a way to ease the pain of your technical team by addressing their concerns.  It’s no secret that I’m a Lean/Agile kind of guy; I truly believe that these philosophies can help balance the scales between support/development/operations, but you have to start somewhere.

“Somewhere” for me is the small fixes; don’t tackle the big projects head-on.  Focus on being successful at a couple of small things (e.g., reduce the number of support calls in a measurable fashion, or refactor some small but essential bit of code).  Make sure that these changes are measureable, and make sure that you report the changes to your boss AND to your team.  This accomplishes two things:

  1. It shows measurable progress (in my experience, bosses love metrics), and
  2. It encourages your team by giving them a couple of quick successes.

If your team doesn’t see progress, then in their mind, “nothing is being done”.  Your boss wants to know how you’re improving efficiency and effectiveness in terms of dollar signs; your team wants to know that they’re solving a technical problem.  Make sure you can address both of those needs.

More to come.

2013-02-06 by Professional Development SQLServerPedia Syndication 0