DevOps Culture – A Transformational Component for Rapid Value Delivery in the Government

For government agencies, value generally flows through layers from the agency itself to various contractors and vendors, and eventually into the hands of the users. For meeting agency missions in a timely manner, it is imperative we build a culture of shared responsibility based on the foundations of DevOps and Lean Agile Leadership to transform how we’ve traditionally delivered products, solutions and services. This cultural transformation fosters a “badge-less society” where value driven collaboration becomes the core for delivering faster and with higher quality. This culture erodes silos and layers to create whole-team-ownership which enables all roles with varying responsibilities to work together and support one another toward a common agency vision and mission; one that is user and customer focused with responsible representation of taxpayer dollars. When traditional layers result in hand-offs without collaboration, value struggles to flow to the users at a steady pace resulting in bottlenecks and brittle, large batches of capabilities. This session depicts lessons learned in transforming traditional siloed and layered organizations to value driven, collaborative cultures from the agency and all its contractors and vendors where flow is enabled through continuous collaboration, systems thinking and relentless improvement to build better product with faster releases. While this story is reflective of our government experience, this is one that can be applied to all businesses.