Understanding DevOps: People Over Processes | The IT Guy Show Ep. 5

I sat down with Laura Santamaria, a developer advocate at Dell Technologies, to talk about DevOps and how to actually implement it in a real organization. Her core message stuck with me: people come before processes and tools.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• People over processes over tools. Laura is firm that you cannot buy your way to DevOps. The culture has to come first, or the tooling just papers over the problem.
• Safe failure is a feature. We talked about why teams need room to fail safely, and how that changes the way people take on hard work.
• You can drive change from where you are. Laura had real, practical advice for individual contributors on affecting change without waiting for a title or permission.

If DevOps has always sounded like a pile of tools to you, this reframes the whole thing.