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Create slack time for important improvement projects

They also started to standardize and very deliberately reduce the supported infrastructure and configurations. One decision was to switch everything to PHP and MySQL. This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one: they wanted both Dev and Ops to be able to understand the stack, so that everyone can contribute if they wanted to, as well as enabling everyone to be able to read, rewrite and fix someone else’s code.

and most importantly, a culture that the rest of the world admires.

Visible Ops Handbook

They have events like “Meetsy” (suggested lunch groups to meet people you may not work directly with) and “Eatsy” (where the entire company eats together).

Clear documented standards and processes are a must, but they aren’t set in stone. They can and should change as your business grows.

Don’t guess at what’s wrong with your infrastructure–graph it.

The management ideals that started getting formed included: Accept failures but don’t lower standards. Failures happen, and it’s best if they’re visible, understood, and used a springboards to greatness. Trust but verify. Blameless post-mortems Welcome one-on-ones Career planning Happy company = happy community

They created and implemented the “Developer on Call” program, to address the problem of IT Operations asking, “why should I be the only person waking up at 3am?” To create more developer responsibility and accountability, and to ensure that IT Operations had the necessary resources on hand during deployments, each developer rotated to be on call for one week. With the company’s current size, this translates to one week every three years that a developer would have to be on call 24/7.

They also adopted the mantra, “If it moves, graph it.”

ending the era when management would just say, “Go do this” or “Go do that.” People were happy to come to work, and contribute in ways beyond their job description.

1) Gain support from the top and bottom to change culture, 2) Increase transparency both within the organization and to the public, and 3) Pay back technical debt as soon as possible.

We believe that the very first thing that an organization must do when embarking on this journey is to do the following: Create slack time for important improvement projects Keep batch sizes small and the planning horizon short (e.g., weeks, not months) Keep prioritizing higher “the system of work” over “doing work”

My notes are below, but you can find the full recorded video recorded by Damon Edward here and their Slideshare link here.

Community and culture, Rembetsy asserts in the talk, is the foundation of any company. And how does one go about fostering community and encouraging positive culture? You begin by eliminating barriers, getting rid of silos, and encouraging collaboration across the entire company.

At Velocity London 2012, I saw one of the top five presentations I’ve ever seen in my life. In their talk “Continuously Deploying Culture,” Michael Rembetsy @mrembetsy, LinkedIn) and Patrick McDonnell (@mcdonnps, LinkedIn) described the story of their amazing IT transformation that started in 2008.