Building a DevOps Culture

by Mandi Walls

One recent anecdote that I found particularly interesting was buried in a story from The Atlantic about recent trends in repatriating manufacturing work to the United States after years of moving those tasks abroad for labor cost savings. The story of GE’s GeoSpring water heater is fascinating, regardless of the underlying drama of globalization and outsourcing. The product was designed in the U.S. and the specifications were sent to Asia for production; the manufacturing process became a black box that the design team sent instructions to. When looking at how to manufacture this particular product in the U.S., they brought together “design engineers,…but also manufacturing engineers, line workers, staff from marketing and sales” to discuss how best to build it, and discovered the design was “terrible” and no one actually wanted to try to build it. It sounds like Development wrote some code and “threw it over the wall” to Operations to figure out, doesn’t it? GE’s integrated team sat down and redesigned the product with input from everyone, and ended up building a better product, at lower cost.