100 Ideas for DevOps

100 Ideas to bring DevOps into an Organization

Categories

• Coding
• Compensation
• Communication
• Confidence
• Continous learning, experimenting
• Cost reduction
• Cultural Change
• Culture
• Decision Making
• Discipline
• Empowerment
• Hiring
• HR
• IaC
• Incentivize Responsibility
• Lean
• Learning
• Managing Trade-offs
• Organization
• Organizational Change
• Outsourcing
• Process
• Reliability
• Security
• Self-service
• Simplification
• Skills
• Success
• Value

List

ID	Idea	Category
1	Provide unlimited access to online trainings to your employees	HR; Learning; Skills
2	Transfer HR and finance from departments into chapters embedded in the different teams	Organizational Change
3	Let devs live the life of ops for a while and vice versa	Cultural Change
4	Let a young promising employee mentor management on new technologies or simply usage of technologies	Cultural Change
5	Ask a venture capital firm to listen to the pitch of your senior management trying to virtually sell their department	Cultural Change; Value;
6	Give credits to any of your IT colleagues on public forums	Continous learning, experimenting
7	Target the shutdown of your email server to be replaced by more modern communication means	Cultural Change
8	Use Markdown as your default format for documents (blogs, minutes, user stories, documentation) and git as your way to track history and to collaborate.	Cultural Change
9	All IT staff members have at least minimum shell script skills	Skills; HR; Hiring
10	Teach IT staff members a programming language requiring a minimalist development environment like javascript, python, go, vb.	Skills; HR; Hiring
11	Provide a command line tool to report time instead of a web UI	Cultural Change
12	Teach everybody hacking techniques: social engineering, phishing, password cracking to improve the security on all the systems in the company	Security; Cultural Change
13	Encourage people to interview at software-centric companies so that they understand their expectations	HR; Hiring; Cultural Change
14	Establish agreements with public cloud firms. They can have their employees as intern in your company and vice versa	Skills; Cultural Change
15	Train everyone on simple IT topics and get rid of the IT hotline	Skills; Cost reduction; Self-service
16	Have an exponential complexity for big budget requests, low budget, no question (akin to progressive income tax).	Decision Making; Cultural Change
17	Set lower salary ranges to managers than to technical experts	HR; Compensation
18	Make it ultra simple to give credit to somebody that teaches you something so that these credits result in the transfer of bonus from one employee to the other.	Compensation; Cultural Change
19	What if co-opting recognized talent brings a lot of money to the person hiring the talent?	HR; Compensation
20	Hire with very clear objectives for the first 6 months and schedule monthly review meetings and yearly goals.	HR; Skills; Learning
21	Announce prizes for simplification or automation of processes.	Simplification; Compensation
22	Set financial incentives for objectives achieved in less time than planned.	Compensation; Cultural Change
23	Ops will only get their bonus only if they achieve their SLA with a 0.02% delta: 99.9%+ 0.02%.	Compensation
24	Create financial benefits for all staff involved in running a service.	Incentivize Responsibility
25	Ask IT managers to reduce cost by 20% and to cut release cycles into half every quarter	Managing Trade-offs; Cost reduction
26	So you did not have a single outage in the last month! Restart production now.	Cultural Change
27	Everybody must do oncall rotations, it's free money anyways.	Compensaton; Incentivize Responsibility
28	Make on-call voluntary. If you don't have a hard time finding engineers, you must have reliable systems.	Cultural Change; Incentivize Responsibility
29	Make on-call voluntary. If you don't have a hard time finding engineers, then your DevOps maturity is high.	Incentivize Responsibility
30	Stop feature development if your engineers do not create code for more than 50% of their time.	Cultural Change
31	If you are having a separate DevOps Team, you're doing it wrong.	Culture
32	If all of your development is done externally, you're doing it wrong.	Outsourcing
33	If you are outsourcing on-call, you're doing it wrong.	Outsourcing
34	Teach your developers when to enable "bullshit mode".	Culture; Communication; Empowerment; Learning
35	Fight the "I used to be a developer syndrom"	Culture; Coding
36	Every manager should be able to push code into production	Coding; Confidence; Empowerment
37	Let senior management roll-out features by the push of a physical button!	Confidence; Empowerment
38	Remove "hand-over" from the dictionary.	Culture; Outsourcing;
39	Every time someone says "hand-over" have them pay the next cradle of beer.	Culture
40	Every time someone says "let me ssh into ..." have them pay the next cradle of beer.	Confidence; Security;
41	Implement approval workflow for ssh access, make it complicated to use and track frequency of use.	Cultural change; Discipline
42	I’m going to delete 10 lines of code from your project and if the build is green, we deploy!	Confidence
43	What if we put the data into the cloud first?	Culture; Outsourcing
44	Automating triggers is as important as automating processes	Self-service; Discipline
45	If you are managing software projects like any other project, you're doing it wrong!	Discipline; Organization; Process
46	You can't steer, if you are not moving	Culture; Process
47	Open up APIs for all internal systems (PPM, Finance, ...)	Simplification; Cultural Change
48	A new developer should deploy to production on his first day.	Success
49	If you run unicorn sprints frequently, rethink your DevOps approach	Success
50	In a mature DevOps culture, there should be no unicorn sprints	Success
51	The amount of tickets that you need to file to run your service, is inversionally proportional to your DevOps maturity	Self-service; Simplification
52	The amount of emails and people on cc that you need to send to run your service, is inversionaly propotional to your level of DevOps maturity	Self-service; Simplification
53	The amount of people that you need to speak to to run to run your service, is inversionaly propotional to your level of DevOps maturity	Self-service; Simplification
54	Put trust on the developers you have, and they will create great things	Empowerment
55	Software development is chaotic, follow the discipline but be ready to embrace chaos	Empowerment
56	Communication is terrible, keep the teams small	Simplification; Organization
57	Everybody is responsible end to end of their change	Culture
58	The reviewer should be able to deploy reviewee's code	Simplification; Confidence
59	UI configurations are the evil	IaC
60	Stay away of old IT if you can, don't try to change it	Confidence
61	Developers should be interviewed by technical people	HR; Hiring
62	Staff teams so they can be responsible end-2-end	Process; Organization
63	Success of an application should be measured by customer adoption	Process; Success
64	It's not a problem if production fails, it's a problem when you did not notice production is failing.	Reliabilty
65	If writing unit tests for your work is hard, maybe your code is difficult to understand	Skills; Coding
66	IT managers should have technical experience	Managing Trade-offs; Skills
67	Non IT managers should trust IT managers technical decisions	Managing Trade-offs
68	IT managers should understand business goals and make a good choice understanding the different trade-offs	Managing Trade-offs
69	External partners should have an "open source mind"	Outsourcing
70	External partners should be able to provide consultants as interns for your company when required	Outsourcing
71	External partners should have a flexible pricing plan	Outsourcing
72	You will never get a product with quality, functionality and on time: you have to choose two	Decision Making
73	Reinforce your arguments with data and working prototypes	Communication; Simplification; Value
74	Ask forgiveness instead of permission, when strictly necessary	Decision Making; Managing Trade-offs
75	Non technical managers are smart, they just need to have a high level explanation	Communication
76	Whenever conflict might arise, set up a robot to handle it. People can't argue with robots	Process
77	Building trust should be your top priority	Cultural Change
78	If a colleague made a mistake, blame the process, and fix it so it won't happen again	Culture; Learning
79	Version control everything	Coding
80	Discipline should enable flexibility, not the other way around	Discipline
81	Treat errors in your monitoring system like production outages.	Reliability
82	....value developer velocity....	Process
83	Development, staging, or test are like production, don't give your developers access to these systems.	Discipline
84	Record and meter ssh-access, put incentives to lower the total login count.	Compensation; Cultural Change
85	You don't do DevOps to reduce cost in the first place.	Cultural Change
86	Code that is not in production is a liability	Lean
87	Manage a top ten list of long running systems, put it on a big screen, call it wall of shame.	Culture; Discipline
88	Make everything a software problem.	Coding; Culture
89	Instead of wasting time and resources fighting the inevitable, empower developers and reap the rewards.	Hiring; HR
90	Why don't we start with the data?	Culture
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