The Enterprise DevOps Framework Explained at AppD Summit NYC

Photo credit: App Dynamics.com

How to build a scalable mindset, that delivers strategic value

Prior to joining Contino, I was lucky enough to work in an environment where my direct-line leadership provided me with freedom and safety to experiment within an enterprise software team. I shared a good bit of my background and history in a recent interview with Contino President, Jason McDonald. I found this opportunity to be fundamental in my ability to forge a mindset that allowed for rapid growth, experimentation and tight feedback loops that empowered a fairly substantial culture shift within the business unit at my prior company. Upon speaking with Contino's Matt Farmer (CEO) and Andrew Gordon-Brooks (VP Engineering & Delivery EMEA), I learned my light-touch approach to DevOps adoption was neither novel nor well-codified enough.

Through Matt, Andrew and later Ben Wootton, Contino CTO, (when he finally decided to return from holiday), I was introduced to Momentum, Contino’s battle-tested framework for enterprise DevOps adoption. The framework is based on what the Contino team has learned from around 70 different enterprise transformation projects, of varying levels of maturity and complexity.

• Lightweight
• Built for scale
• Holistic
• Opinionated
• Measurable.

This model extended my findings and empirical process that had been growing over the past seven years. A bootstrapped means to communicate, execute and scale a fundamental cultural shift in the highly regulated enterprise with built-in proof points that create safety for the governance teams and stakeholders, but enough freedom and space to ensure top engineering talent is engaged with the work. What's more, Momentum was portable enough to be adopted into both organizations that embrace monolithic or regulated SDLC frameworks like SAFe or [Gov’t Agile] and respect HIPAA/PCI/SOX and other regulatory statutes, and to help frame enterprises with loosely established delivery models.

In this first year with Contino, I have seen this model resonate with the Financial, Healthcare, Government and Insurance agencies around the world. Providing the ability to inspect roadmap-impacting outcomes in three-months or less while up-skilling the people and process in tandem is message that should bring grins, even to the most hardened PMO director.

This month, I will be speaking at the AppDynamics Summit in New York on this model, various experience reports, and the underlying principles that make it so effective.

The event is a world class gathering of integrators, speakers and attendees all with common goals to improve software delivery within the enterprise. I plan to bring my own style to the interesting Silent Disco formatted conference (I have no idea how this one will work out). The event is free to attend, but seating is limited — so please consider registering and be sure to mark my talk as one you want to attend. I plan to have fun but also bring a career's worth of perspective to the session.

The talk will cover several core learning objectives:

1. The history of enterprise frameworks — and why most are bad

2. How has Contino applied Momentum at scale and brought a global insurance company to realize 400% faster delivery for digital product

3. What are the principles of Momentum

4. How to start your DevOps journey in the regulated enterprise.

If you attend, I would love to hear any feedback on the talk, or connect after to understand what you see as the potential for this framework in your organization. I can be found at rl@contino.io or on twitter @AgilePHL.

Register here for my session