Tomek Pająk
Software Engineering Manager, SEQR, Poland
On daily basis Tomek is Software Engineering Manager at fintech company Seqr. It is the place where on daily basis he faces challenges of developing a disruptive product and takes repsonsibility for dealing with them. Tomek shares his experience as a speaker at international conferences and as an author of articles for InfoQ. He specializes in agile transformations, DevOps transformations, bulding high-performance organizations, organizational culture and navigating in complex adaptive systems.
As a consultant and coach Tomek witnesses other organizations trying to transform their businesses by adoption of certain concepts or technologies.
Presentation
DEVOPS TRANSFORMATION FROM CULTURE PERSPECTIVE
Your organization decided to implement Scrum. However, Scrum will not solve your problems, it will make them visible. One of the challenges you may face is how to construct a high-performance organization which is able to deliver shippable increments at least every sprint. This means that your organization needs to be able to bring new ideas to production environment really fast.
And here comes DevOps which fulfills a promise given by Scrum. DevOps understood comprehensively as certain culture and tools shared by everyone in the company. How to perform DevOps transformation then? If you agree that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, strategy of building high-performance organization via DevOps must be tailored to culture a given organization has. Hence, based on Competing Values Framework (by Cameron and Quinn) I would like to take a closer look at what DevOps transformation actually means in terms of influencing organizational culture. My thesis is that depending on organizational culture (hierarchy, clan, market or adhocracy) different approach to DevOps transformation should be taken for it to be successful. Bearing this in mind, how should you modify constraints in your organization to influence culture change in the right direction? What challenges may you face depending on the existing culture? To answer those questions, the key thing is to understand that transformation is highly contextual and different types of leadership (mentor, organizer, visionary or hard driver?) are required in each case. Eventually, chances of the transformation being successful vary with respect to existing culture as well.
In my talk I would like to discuss those issues based on my experience as Software Engineering Manager being responsible for the DevOps transformation and as a coach witnessing other organizations trying to perform the change. I would like to provide you with a thorough case study of an organization and the corresponding transformation, which – hopefully – can be used as an example of similar insight into your company.
microWorkshop (AMC track)
NAVIGATING YOUR COMPANY WITH AN ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE COMPASS
Once a certain business decision is made it needs to be executed. The way you do it has an impact on success rate of the initiative. According to my experience (and proven by research), awareness of organizational culture when leading change reduces risk of failure.
During the workshop I would like to help you to visualize organization culture in your company. Based on that we will experiment in a safe-to-fail environment with solutions to common challenges faced by organizations. The outcome of the workshop depends on the examples you are willing to share. I will bring mine so I count on yours as well.
