The book Accelerate is a solid book on DevOps culture, with many valuable insights resulting from a careful study of its principles and thoughtful consideration of how those principles could be applied to your current job or situation. It is undoubtedly a book that I will return to again and again over the years.
With this book having a greater focus on culture over any specific technology or skill, the book club experience needed to be different from how I've handled previous books. Whereas with a technical book, the how is very clearly spelled out in the book, and what was most beneficial to the developers in the book club meeting was to provide them with a practice problem that would allow them to exercise what they've learned.
But in the case of a cultural book, like this, you are mainly supplied with guidelines and ideas, and the how for your particular company and situation has to be figured out. As such, the book club meeting time was best utilized by discussing the principles and determining how to apply them.
With this being the case, something that I was able to do to help these meetings to be more effective was to create bullet point summaries of the chapters that were to be discussed in the meetup, which then allowed for easy lookup and reference of these points for the discussion. Here are links to each of those summaries:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 16
In addition to these summaries, I also had an ebook copy of the book that I had pulled up on a large display during the meeting that would then allow me to turn to any reference that the group asked for at a moment's notice.
All in all, I do feel that this went well, but I think there may have been a missed opportunity. Because culture takes time to implement and change, over the weeks that we were reading the book we came up with potential ideas at a far faster rate than they could be applied, and as such we've (rightly) put our focus on just a few key ideas, but with the detrimental side affect that a number of the ideas that were either small or of less immediate importance have potentially been forgotten.
Something that I would like to experiment with the next time I take a group through a book on culture would be to maintain and update a list of ideas that have come out of each meetup, which would be kept roughly in what people deem to be the priority order. The idea would be that it would still allow you to first focus on a small subset of ideas that seem to be the most important, while also maintaining the list of ideas so that good ideas don't get forgotten.
