Accelerate Chapter 3 Discussion Points

Chapter 3 of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations covered these points:

• Culture is of huge importance, but is intangible
• Needed to find a model of culture that:
• Was well-defined in scientific literature
• Could be measured effectively
• Would have predictive power in our domain
• It is possible to influence and improve culture by implementing DevOps practices
• Modeling and measuring culture
• Organizational culture can exist at three levels
• basic assumptions
• Formed over time as members of a group or organization make sense of relationships, events, and activities
• Least "visible" of the levels
• Things we just "know"
• Hard to articulate
• values
• Provide a lens through which group members view and interpret the relationships, events, and activities around them
• More "visible"
• Can be discussed and even debated by those who are aware of them
• Quite often the "culture" we think of when we talk about the culture of a team and organization
• artifacts
• Most "visible"
• Can include written mission statements or creeds, technology, formal procedures, or even heroes and rituals
• Westrum's organizational cultures
• Pathological (power-oriented)
• Characterized by large amounts of fear and threat
• People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons, or distort it to make themselves look better
• Bureaucratic (rule-oriented)
• Protect departments
• Those in the department want to maintain "turf", insist on their own rules
• Generative (performance-oriented)
• Focus on the mission
• Everything is subordinated to good performance
• People collaborate more effectively
• Higher level of trust
• Organizational culture predicts the way information flows through an organization
• Good information
• provides answers to the questions that the receiver needs answered
• is timely
• is presented in such a way that it can be effectively used by the receiver
• Measuring culture
• Use Likert scale with strongly worded statements
• Determine if measure is valid from a statistical point of view
• Discriminant validity, convergent validity, and reliability
• What does Westrum organizational culture predict?
• Organizations with better information flow function more effectively
• Better culture leads to better software delivery performance and organizational performance
• Consequences of Westrum's theory for technology organizations
• Both resilience and the ability to innovate through responding to change are essential
• Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions
• In the case of failure, our goals should be
• To discover how we could improve information flow so that people have better or more timely information, or
• To find better tools to help prevent catastrophic failures following apparently mundane operations
• How do we change culture?
• The way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave -- what they do
• Lean management and continuous deliver impact culture
• You can act your way to a better culture by implementing these practices in tech organizations