In this episode, we chat with Excella Co-Founder and Partner Jeff Gallimore about all things DevOps culture. In this episode we take a departure from our technical deep dives to explore culture: how to measure culture, culture typology, psychological safety, how continuous delivery impacts culture, how culture affects performance, and more! We even get into a discussion around real-world experiences such as a joint venture called NUMMI. Listen here:

Here are the show notes:

DevOps on AWS News

Episode Topics

  1. Jeff Gallimore Intro & Background
    1. The Excella Story – Founding/ Co-Founding
    2. How Excella helps customers 
    3. AWS, Cloud, DevOps 
  2. Culture and safety – why is it important, how to measure it, how to change it, burn out, etc.
    1. Culture 
    2. CALMS framework (Key aspects of DevOps) 
      1. Culture
      2. Automation
      3. Lean
      4. Measurement
      5. Sharing
    3. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker
    4. In Gartner’s 2018 CIO Survey, “46% of respondents named culture as the biggest barrier to scaling digital transformation”. 
  3. The State of DevOps 2015
    1. Dr. Ron Westrum’s Culture Typology  – Three Cultures Model
      1. Pathological
      2. Bureaucratic
      3. Generative
    2. Implementing Westrum’s Three Cultures Model in real-world examples
  4. Continuous Delivery and Culture
    1. Mindset shift
    2. Technical practices
  5. Psychological safety
    1. Westrum’s Culture Typology
    2. Google re:Work Study
    3. Psychological safety
      1. “If I make a mistake on our team, it is not held against me”. 
    4. Accountability
    5. Just Culture – Sidney Dekker
      1. “Human Error”
  6. Amazon S3 Outage Incident
    1. AWS publishes their after action report
  7. Culture and performance 
    1. Burn out
  8. NUMMI Story 
    1. A joint venture between Toyota and GM
    2. Two main changes; culture and leadership
    3. Stopping the line
    4. Andon Cord
      1. The measure of Andon Cord pulls per day
      2. Virtual Andon Cord at Excella
  9. Coding – Clojure

Additional Resources

About DevOps on AWS Radio

On DevOps on AWS Radio, we cover topics around applying DevOps principles and practices such as Continuous Delivery on the Amazon Web Services cloud. This is what we do at Stelligent for our customers. We’ll bring listeners into our roundtables and speak with engineers who’ve recently published on our blog and we’ll also be reaching out to the wider DevOps on AWS community to get their thoughts and insights.

The overall vision of this podcast is to describe how listeners can create a one-click (or “no click”) implementation of their software systems and infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services cloud so that teams can deliver software to users whenever there’s a business need to do so. The podcast will delve into the cultural, process, tooling, and organizational changes that can make this possible including:

  • Automation of
    • Networks (e.g. VPC)
    • Compute (EC2, Containers, Serverless, etc.)
    • Storage (e.g. S3, EBS, etc.)
    • Database and Data (RDS, DynamoDB, etc.)
  • Organizational and Team Structures and Practices
  • Team and Organization Communication and Collaboration
  • Cultural Indicators
  • Version control systems and processes
  • Deployment Pipelines
    • Orchestration of software delivery workflows
    • Execution of these workflows
  • Application/service Architectures – e.g. Microservices
  • Automation of Build and deployment processes
  • Automation of testing and other verification approaches, tools and systems
  • Automation of security practices and approaches
  • Continuous Feedback systems
  • Many other Topics
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