DevOps and the HumanDebt™

You may have “read me” over the past few years bang on and on about how urgently we need to audit and then reduce HumanDebt™ and I feel we’re starting to see the proof of how, if we want to do that, we must all urgently learn from the DevOps movement as it encouragingly is the only worthwhile cultural transformation method we can rely on.

When I first came to the realisation that HumanDebt existed, I could tell pretty quickly that it existed everywhere really and I can assure you that once you “see it you won’t be able to unsee it” either, it is, in differing degrees, ubiquitous.

While much more painful, visible and debilitating in large, slow-moving antiquated organisations, it starts sipping into the cultural fabric of any shop of any size and in any industry as soon as the first few people-related balls are being dropped. No one is immune, even the likes of small and nimble scale-ups can start amassing it fast should they grow “wrong” and let’s face it, the SRE team at Google and the Netflix recent scandals are examples that even the most people-focused of organisations can start building this debt too.

So, if it isn’t about size or industry what do the places that have the least of this HumanDebt have in common? Agility.

If you read the “People Before Tech” book, you know my stance is that agility in general and DevOps, in particular, are “God’s gift” to workplace transformation as they drive home the need for people to be at the centre. They are, ultimately all about culture and mindset beyond a set of processes or practices. When they are at the core of the enterprise they intrinsically change everything.