And now we come to the most “boring” part. Right? Maintenance. The death of joy for the innovator. Or is it? I don’t think so. Continuous innovation is at the core of DevOps and Lean methodology. Maintenance is essential to keeping the spirit of DevOps strong, and automation that isn’t improving will grow stale and useless.
So, let’s review the IT Automation Curator’s job description on last time:
- Collect existing automation, and then Catalog it where others can find it (See Part 2)
- Develop new automation based on requirements from IT (See Part 3)
- Train others on how to use the automated processes (See Part 4)
- Maintain the existing automation
Going back to Lean methodology, we can look to the idea of Continual Improvement or Kaizen. There are 3 main areas from Masaaki Imai‘s 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.
- Reflection of processes. (Feedback)
- Identification, reduction, and elimination of suboptimal processes. (Efficiency)
- Incremental, continual steps rather than giant leaps. (Evolution)
Use Metrics and Reporting for Feedback
How can you improve if you don’t know how far you’ve come and how well you are doing? That’s like going on a diet without ever weighing yourself or even looking in the mirror. Healthy weight loss involves such small changes every week that it would discouraged if you didn’t look at changes over the long term (I speak from experience). So, why do so few companies and automation vendors include metrics and reporting on automation efficiency?! The whole point of implementing automation is to reduce waste, reduce costs, and increase velocity. But you have no context for understand if you have succeeded if you don’t have metrics and reporting (I talked about this in a previous post).
Ruthlessly eliminate sub-optimal processes
The whole point of this process is get rid of wasted effort and time – muda. The hardpart here is that once you agree to continually improve your automated processes, you have to be ruthless in your evaluation of their efficiency. That means there are no sacred cows. Just because somebody smart and dedicated invested hours of their life into creating something, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved or scrapped entirely. The whole team has to be dedicated to, and incentivized towards, efficiency and continuous improvement. This point is important – these kind of improvements come from the grassroots – not the top. If the people in the trenches aren’t bought into continual improvement, it won’t work.
Baby Steps, not Leaps of Faith
I know the hardest part of this approach for me is the gradualism. I like to grandiloquently solve grandiose problems with lofty and visionary solutions. The problem is that most of those involve large amounts of kool-aid, and they are never finished. The truly mature IT organization has to keep their eye on the goals of the business, and relentlessly reduce muda – step by tortuous step. We can refer back to the weight loss analogy. You lose weight through all of the small victories – Do I really need that donut? One serving is good enough. But bringing us back to our first point – small victories only show up as victories when you can measure your long term progress. Otherwise it looks like tentative, timid, risk-adverse behavior.
And so, we reach the last chapter of my IT Automation Curator series. It has been a lot of fun writing it, and I hope that you enjoyed it as well. I am looking forward to continuing to explore how the proven methods of lean and agile can be applied to DevOps and Operations overall.
