1. KATY SAULPAUGH, AGILE PRACTICE LEAD
Agile & DevOps:
Handling Resistance
KATY SAULPAUGH, AGILE PRACTICE LEAD

2. ENTERPRISE AGILE COACH
ABOUT ME
Katy Saulpaugh is an expert agile practitioner who has implemented culture and technology change strategies at all scales for private, public and nonprofit clients in the US and Europe. She specializes in agile coaching and facilitation, and has enabled clients to become more agile at the team and organization level. She has also developed solutions to drive adoption for IT and knowledge management projects using online communications, instruction design, and employee engagement approaches. Outside of her professional work, Katy is a founding member of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Association of Change Management Professionals.
Katy Saulpaugh
ENTERPRISE AGILE COACH
& CHANGE LEADER
@KATYSOUTHPAW

3. 5 AREAS OF EXPERTISE 20+ EXPERT CONSULTANTS 12+ COUNTRIES 100+
EK AT A GLANCE
STABLE CLIENT BASE
Federal
Commercial
20+ EXPERT CONSULTANTS
BASED IN DC
BLOGS
5 AREAS OF EXPERTISE
100+
PUBLISHED CONTENT
BY EK CONSULTANTS
PRESENTATIONS
AGILE TRANSFORMATION
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
CONTENT & BRAND STRATEGY
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
STRATEGY & DESIGN
VIDEOS
GLOBAL REACH WITH CLIENTS IN
12+ COUNTRIES
WHITEPAPERS
= 10 pieces of
thought leadership

4. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1
WHAT RESISTANCE LOOKS LIKE 2
TIP #1: TRANSLATE TO BUSINESS TERMS 3
TIP #2: SHOW HOW AGILE + DEVOPS CONCEPTS WORK OUTSIDE IT 4
TIP #3: TELL THE STORY OF TRANSFORMATION

5. Can you show me how to matrix someone across 20 projects?
OVERHEARD ON AGILE + DEVOPS
You go ahead and do DevOps, I’ll keep using my process that works for me
I need to know what we’re delivering because I have to plan next year’s budget
Agile doesn’t work for the kind of creative work I do, which takes time
Can you show me how to matrix someone across 20 projects?

6. DEVOPS RESISTANCE
Smells:
- “That’s devops problem”

7. Managers Team Members Don’t want to make decisions quickly.
CULTURAL FACTORS OF AGILE + DEVOPS ADOPTION
Managers
Don’t want to make decisions quickly.
Afraid of teams losing accountability.
Don’t want ownership without control.
Team Members
Don’t want ownership of process improvement.
No longer rewarded for hero syndrome.
Afraid of being punished if an experiment fails.
Change is hard for everyone, but in our experience, different group experience it in different ways. Managers often feel like their team is going to lose all accountability if it becomes self-organizing. This is a fine distinction between self-organizing and self-managing. This is really a question of ownership. A technology manager told me once, well if the team asks for this one process change, what’s to stop them from doing whatever they want?
In addition, product managers and creatives in particular can feel very pressured to make decisions. The pace of Agile is different to what they’re used to, and they have to battle perfectionism and put out “good enough” concepts.
On the team side, for those who are less engaged, taking ownership because they are afraid of what will happen if it doesn’t work out. I
In addition, high performers may feel like they are not going to get the same recognition as before. But typically having more freedom and ownership over process is the best motivator for this group, in addition to not burning out.

8. Tools of the trade: communication, engagement, training, and coaching
HOW TO HELP: CHANGE MANAGEMENT
MEASURE
Success and improve iteratively
COMMUNICATE
Early results using two ways channels
LISTEN
To feedback and show its impact on the project
COLLABORATE
With users to create understanding
Change Management: a discipline focused on increasing adoption of a people, process, or technology change
Tools of the trade: communication, engagement, training, and coaching
EK’s Change Model

9. A 1. Translate to business terms 3. Tell the story of transformation
3 CHANGE MANAGEMENT TIPS A
1. Translate to business terms
3. Tell the story of transformation
2. Show Agile + DevOps can thrive in other contexts

10. TIP #1
TRANSLATE TO BUSINESS TERMS

11. process mindset A process, method or set of tools to run IT projects
DEFINITIONS OF AGILE AND DEVOPS
process
Internal and external
A process, method or set of tools to run IT projects
mindset
An approach emphasizing learning and adapting with your customers

12. HOW AGILE IS USUALLY EXPLAINED
How many of you have seen this chart before? This is the part where I usually see business stakeholders’ eyes glaze over. This chart was never meant for them, it was meant for Scrum practitioners, people who might be developing the product or filling the ScrumMaster role. Where is business value on this diagram? It’s somewhere in the box, probably, but this isn’t going to be enough to sell Agile to your typical CFO, or head of sales.

13. A MORE BUSINESS FOCUSED ALTERNATIVE
Here’s how an iterative, incremental approach might look. You start with a prioritized backlog of work, take the highest priority items into a short iteration of a few weeks, review progress daily within the team, and come out at the end of a cycle with a demo of a small piece of a working product. This allows a team to get feedback from customers or stakeholders that allows them to course correct earlier.
Agile promotes the idea of releasing a minimum viable product: releasing a product before it’s fully built out to get customer feedback on it. So yes, ideally, there really is a release every few weeks – some are even less – Spotify releases upgrades a few times a week and Facebook does daily.
It’s important to note the different between project (build to spec, then it’s done), vs product (something that evolves continuously as long as it’s being used). If you think in these terms, the Agile cycle can be applied to many types of products – marketing, financial, etc.

14. HOW DEVOPS IS USUALLY EXPLAINED
Changing name from sysadmin to devops engineer (do you do dev and ops? Congratulations, you’re a devops engineer!)
Tools that do these things

15. A MORE BUSINESS FOCUSED ALTERNATIVE
From Gene Kim, who wrote the Phoenix Project
Credit: Gene Kim

16. WE NEED TO CHANGE TO… RELEASE PRODUCTS MORE OFTEN
BUSINESS VALUE OF AGILE + DEVOPS
WE NEED TO CHANGE TO…
RELEASE PRODUCTS MORE OFTEN
MAKE COLLABORATION WITH CUSTOMERS EASIER
BECOME MORE EFFICIENT IN OUR PROCESSES
EMPOWER TEAMS TO MAKE MORE DECISIONS
IMPROVE AVAILABILITY, RELIABILITY, AND SECURITY

17. TIP #2
SHOW HOW AGILE + DEVOPS CONCEPTS
WORK OUTSIDE OF IT

18. Limited collaboration Out of sync with product cycles
PROBLEMS WITH LIMITING AGILE TO DEV
Limited collaboration
Out of sync with product cycles
Expectation setting becomes onerous
Limited collaboration – classic problem of PO not being available to the team.
Out of sync with product cycles – if marketing and sales don’t take a more iterative approach, customers will likely be confused
Expectation setting is all about communicating upward to executives. Treating change as a problem is common if leadership hasn’t adopted the Agile mindset.

19. LEGAL EDUCATION MARKETING CUSTOMER SUPPORT
AGILE IN OTHER DISCIPLINES
LEGAL
EDUCATION
Scrum Portugal – Ademar Aguiar teaches Agile and Scrum at the University of Porto.
The Lonely Planet legal team adopted Agile practices after seeing it work with their IT team, including retrospectives, a backlog, daily standup, etc.
Oreo’s a great example of agile marketing – they responded to the Superbowl power outage in 2013 by tweeting “you can still dunk in the dark”
KLM is an example of a highly Agile social media brand from a customer service perspective. The #happytohelp campaign last year (show video)? Was about creating delight by reacting to what people were tweeting
MARKETING
CUSTOMER SUPPORT

20. TIP #3
TELL THE STORY OF TRANSFORMATION

21. HOW OFTEN AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT IS USED
THE FUTURE NEED FOR AGILE + DEVOPS
HOW OFTEN AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT IS USED
(PMI PULSE OF THE PROFESSION, 2016)
2/3 of IT organizations are either fully agile or or leaning toward agile
Scaling agile is increasing: 57% of organizations use Agile for program management; 51% use Agile for portfolio management
DevOps adoption is at 38% (Gartner, 2016)
Agile approaches are being used for teams outside of IT such as marketing and HR

22. Flexible Controlling Destiny Choice Urgency Deliberation Reward Risk
HOW TO MEASURE AGILITY
Flexible
Controlling
Destiny
Choice
Some of these cultural factors come from Carte and Fox – but they can be adapted to fit any organization
Urgency
Deliberation
Reward
Risk
Formal
Informal
Team focused
Individual focused

23. Flexible Controlling Destiny Choice Urgency Deliberation Reward Risk
HOW TO MEASURE AGILITY
Flexible
Controlling
Destiny
Choice
Some of these cultural factors come from Carte and Fox – but they can be adapted to fit any organization
Urgency
Deliberation
Reward
Risk
Formal
Informal
Team focused
Individual focused

24. HOW TO TELL THE STORY OF AGILE + DEVOPS
Spread awareness of why the change is taking place.
Helping people understand benefits to them of adopting Agile and DevOps.
Create feedback loops, fostering trust and transparency.
Change management techniques can be applied to any type of change – for Agile we typically see multiple types: people, for organization changes, roles and team formation; process, for the way they are managed, and technology/tools as well.
Agile is going to be a foreign concept to many people outside of IT, who are key to its success, so it’s important they understand why the change is taking place and how it affects them. In terms of taking ownership, working collaboratively also helps people be engaged with the changes taking place.
What’s in it for me?

25. A 1. Translate to business terms 3. Tell the story of transformation
RECAP: THREE TECHNIQUES A
1. Translate to business terms
3. Tell the story of transformation
2. Show Agile + DevOps can thrive in other contexts

26. IT’S TIME FOR QUESTIONS!
Q & A SESSION Q A
&
THANKS FOR LISTENING
IT’S TIME FOR QUESTIONS!
@KATYSOUTHPAW
LINKEDIN.COM/IN/KATYSAULPAUGH