Enterprise DevOps & SRE: How to lead them into obsession
Have you ever seen an Agile or Devops transformation die a slow and miserable death?
Nothing is tangibly improving, and the stakeholders are getting impatient. The impatience spreads. The impatience stagnates. The collapse itself is quick. And it’s hardly over before it’s back to the beginning for the redesign.
But the restart slows down even more. The new leadership reorients itself, the additional stakeholders need to be convinced and the readjusted approach tailored.
The cold reality is that when a transformation fails it’s often because people aren’t actually willing to be transformed. Not enough time and attention has been paid to the fundamental principle: motivation. A transformation requires changing many people’s workflow, established beliefs and fundamental principles.
How will an adoption succeed? When practitioners do things differently. This doesn’t happen by itself, it has to be enabled by managers who pay attention to the motivation of the individuals.
Here we’ll look at some of the reasons why this is so tricky and so necessary. We’ll look at how to cultivate motivation at a team and organizational level. We’ll suggest practical activities which will accelerate change and improve the entire organization. Don’t let your adoption die a slow and painful death, take charge and focus on motivating people to make the changes you want.
We can not dictate new habits to knowledge workers, we can only influence their behavior by providing knowledge and options
Ongoing change is the reality we are living in; it’s the only constant. But it’s overwhelming and humans tend to stick to what they know and do. Our transformations require changing daily habits, assumptions and beliefs. That is the real challenge.
Most transformations are led without direct power. Practitioners must be convinced and nudged in the right direction. In transformations, we are dealing with knowledge workers. These are highly educated people, specialists in their field. Managers can influence people, but they can not force them to think in a different direction. Knowledge workers are like artists. They can only create outstanding work when they are independent and have some space to think and create. Forcing them in a specific direction only creates mediocrity.
What successful transformations have in common is that they leverage motivation concepts laid out in a motivation plan
Successful transformations leverage motivation theory activated in a motivation plan. An effective motivation plan must ensure that knowledge workers take the transformation seriously and with adequate commitment. For them, our transformation is competing with their daily work. They do not get an extra hour per day to fulfill the required transformation tasks. Most teams are doing the transition in addition to their daily work. If the priority is too low, it will always be done tomorrow, that means never.
Here we uncover the concept of motivation, give advice on design and implementation. This is your guide not only to surviving the transformation, but flourishing and accelerating.
Motivated employees always look for better ways to do their job and are more productive and deliver higher quality
Let us start to define what motivation is. Motivation is a mild form of obsession. When we are highly motivated, we do things more frequently and over a longer period of time. One key benefit from a motivation concept is a shorter transformation time. Leadership can dictate change, but only highly motivated teams can catapult a company into a new era, transforming fast enough that we can call it a success. A motivation concept also keeps the people on track after the initial buzz dies down. A plan motivates in each phase of a transformation. At the start it creates euphoria, later it keeps the team going and intensifies their effort. This sounds good on paper, but how do we transform that in our reality? A comprehensive motivation concert is based on five areas:
1. Value Communication
It all starts with structured communication. First we must explain to our knowledge workers why this transformation is important and what value it will bring for the company and their work. This communication points out what problems we expect in our transformation and what is required from each practitioner. We are transforming for them, not against them. Think about winning their hearts and minds. The purpose and rationales behind the change must be clear and understood.
Key Elements for Motivation: to increase the possibility that practitioners will act we must answer the following questions in our communication:
Is the situation already determined?
Can I influence the result with my own actions?
Is the result important enough for me?
Does the result lead to the desired outcome?
In our case the answers can be:
No, our team can optimize the deployment frequency in the next 3 month.
Yes, we automate and work in agile sprints.
Yes, no weekend work anymore, because we release software whenever we are ready.
Yes, our users will get new features faster.
Only if our practitioners check all the boxes with no, yes, yes, yes, then they will act.
2. Transformational Leadership
First, experienced and leading staff must understand that each of them is a strong role model for their organization. Whether they like it or not, their behavior influences other practitioners. The role of a leader is especially visible in a changing situation.
Leadership must demonstrate their commitment. Hesitation of a leader multiplies into resistance in the organization.
Communicate frequently, inspire others to take a risk, take away the fear of failing and increase psychologically safety. Listen to concerns and problems. Don’t discuss them away, create solutions and enable them by giving space and responsibilities. Let’s praise good work and achievements. It’s not perfect yet? Then notice the improvement. Praise people personally, in large groups when others can hear it. Create an environment in which you want to work. Each of us can choose each morning again, are you choosing to accelerate the change or block it?
A key motivational aspect is the sense of belonging and identity to a group. This can be to your team and or the transformation itself. Challenge practitioners to take greater ownership for their work. Know your team and align each of them with tasks according to their strengths and weaknesses in order to enhance their performance.
3. Nudging
A holistic motivation concept involves nudging people in the right direction. It makes the new easier to use than the old. We reduce barriers to entry; make it simpler and faster with better usability. And maybe we even add sludge to the old process, adding barriers like additional approvals.
For example, we can create a new IT change process. The new process automates approvals for low risk changes. People who are using the new process just need a few minutes to get all the approvals. Compared to the new, the old process takes just a few days.
Key elements for motivation: we first identify, then understand the use case for our improvement. We must be a choice architect:
Identify teams who are not acting in their best interest / the best interest for the company
Define the decision points and understand the decision-making process and biases
Design the solution, test and measure the outcome
Techniques for nudging are:
Default option: If you do nothing you are in and must actively opt out of something.
A social-proof heuristic: People tend to copy the behavior of other people, for example we can show how many people have chosen one specific option.
Attention grabbing: The school cafeteria places apples next to the cash register. The chocolate is placed in a lower shelf out of the direct view of kids.
Sludging: This is the opposite of nudging; it makes something more complicated and increases barriers like additional approvals or additional costs.
Frequency: We can ask you to re-register to vote every time you move, or we can tie voter registration to your drivers’ license and it is automatically changed when you update your license. In our business context, we can ask, for example, before each manual test cycle if you would like to automate your testing.
4. Gamification
Game elements are highly effective in a business environment. For example, if you help colleagues you gain points. If you accomplished a new skill, you get badges on your social people page. The colorful dashboard shows your team performance. The ranking system compares your team performance with other teams.
Key elements for motivation: set a goal but give space at the same time to explore, test and making own decisions while completing quests. Key elements for motivation are:
Receiving feedback on your progress
Control of the situation and the freedom to generate possibilities
Achieving and showing mastery of a skill or a subject
Purpose and a sense of belonging, being part of a community
Playing games provides fun, exploring a new world creates excitement
5. Competition
Competition is one element of gamification. In a business environment we want to stress competition, because it is powerful and easy to implement. Competition is popular in business not only since the race to the moon between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Competition can take place in three different scenarios. Teams can compete:
1) against others
2) against a reference system or
3) against themselves.
Usually, we use all 3 types of competition successfully in parallel.
To create competition against each other (1), we need a real time leadership board. Here, all teams can see for example the best deployment frequency.
Competition against a reference system (2) can be when a company defines Gold, Silver and Bronze levels of a specific capability.
Competition against themselves(3) uses historical data from the same team. For example the team has less incidents than in the month before.
Key elements for motivation are goal setting, the feeling of progress by receiving feedback on goal achievement and also the sense of belonging. Positive feedback is more encouraging than framing it negatively. Competition in and amongst teams allows for self-efficiency, which in turn lets them spend more time on a specific task.
The execution of the motivation plan drives the standardization of workflows in an enterprise
Reflecting on our learnings, I want to point out some elements which stand out:
By creating company-wide badges we create an enterprise wide standard for a capability. This is the foundation upon which the adoption is measured.
By running competitions we create a unified reporting about the outcome. Now everybody is going in the same direction. Everybody gets measured with the same algorithm. No line manager can tweak their numbers and define their own success anymore.
The activities also give participants a sense of belonging. e feel they are part of something bigger, of a group with shared interests aligned to the same goal. And we tend to copy behavior that is successful. This sense of belonging is a powerful motivator.
One of the most likely reasons that transformations stagnate and fail is a lack of a plan to motivate people. A motivation plan tangibly improves workflow, and when it’s well executed it spreads the obsession for success throughout the company.
Motivation can’t be mandated or forced. It also won’t happen on it’s own. Employees won’t just show up highly motivated: it’s part of leadership’s duty to make them so. Managers must leverage many different ways to motivate their practitioners if they want success.
What does success look like? People show up, they are interested. They are eager to learn. They help others and share their stories and success. They have internalized and made the leap. They are being transformed, and so is the enterprise.
Workflows tangibly improve, stakeholders get excited and then obsessed. The obsession spreads. Team interactions change. Ultimately, the working culture that we all want is being created. Have you ever seen an Agile or Devops transformation being accelerated by a motivational concept instead of dying a slow and miserable death? What do you do to motivate your organization? What has worked best for your teams?
Your follow up reading list:
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Money, Health, and the Environment book by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
Motivation book by Falko Rheinberg
7 Principles of Transformational Leadership: Create a Mindset of Passion, Innovation, and Growth book by Hugh Blane
Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards book by Yu-kai Chou, Scott R. Smith