Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

by Nicole Forsgren

Leaders have the authority and budget to make the large-scale changes that are often needed, to provide air cover when a transformation is underway, and to change the incentives of entire groups of technical professionals— whether they are in development, QA, operations, or information security.

Transformational leadership means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change.

though we often hear stories of DevOps and technology transformation success coming from the grassroots, it is far easier to achieve success when you have leadership support.

In summary, we found that leadership helps build great teams, great technology, and great organizations—but indirectly, leadership enables teams to rearchitect their systems and implement the necessary continuous delivery and Lean management practices.

Encourage teams to organize internal “yak days,” where teams get together to work on technical debt. These are great events because technical debt is so rarely prioritized.

Our research shows that three things are highly correlated with software delivery performance and contribute to a strong team culture: cross-functional collaboration, a climate for learning, and tools.

Unless there’s a good reason not to, practitioners should choose their own tools. If they can build infrastructure and applications the way they want, they’re much more likely to be invested in their work.

If your organization must standardize tools, ensure that procurement and finance are acting in the interests of teams, not the

The system can only tell us what it sees—how many files or repositories are being checked in to version control. But this raw number isn’t meaningful without context.

There are some things that can only be measured using surveys. When we want to ask about perceptions, feelings, and opinions, using surveys is often the only way to do this.

“We give them speed with quality. Sometimes, we may take a little longer than some of the others to reach green, but once we achieve it, we tend to stay green, when a lot of the others go back to red.”

This willingness to experiment with new ways of thinking and working has led ING to where they are today. But it’s important to recognize that there is no checklist or playbook. You can’t “implement” culture change. Implementation thinking (attempting to mimic another company’s specific behavior and practices) is, by its very nature, counter to the essence of generative culture.

Develop and maintain the right mindset. This is about learning and how to create an environment for shared organizational learning-not about just doing the practices, and certainly not about employing tools.

Don’t contract it out to a large consulting firm to expediently transform your organization or to implement new methodologies or practices for you.

A generative culture starts with demonstrating new behaviors, not delegating them.

In all of our research, one thing has proved consistently true: since nearly every company relies on software, delivery performance is critical to any organization doing business today.