Post “Accelerate” Part Deux

Why are we still failing at adopting DevOps in the Enterprise?
What are we going to do about it?

Transcript

1. Rasmus Lystrøm, Stockholm Tech Show, 27 May 2026 Post “Accelerate” Part Deux Why are we still failing at adopting DevOps in the Enterprise? What are we going to do about it?
2. https://www.pexels.com/da-dk/foto/person-hand-papir-generation-6633078/ Disclaimer
3. 2018: DevOps works
4. Why does DevOps fail in the Enterprise?
5. Melvin Conway: How Do Committees Invent?, 1967 “Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
6. CEO CFO COO CHRO CMO CIO
7. Heidi Waterhouse: The Devil’s DevOps silo /ˈsaɪ loʊ / noun : a[n enterprise-grade] security device to prevent the accidental transfer of knowledge from one department to another.
8. CEO CFO CHRO COO CMO CIO CTO CISO CCO CQO CTO CIO CDO CSO CDO DevOps Team The C-Suite 2.0
9. “Siloed DevOps”
10. DevOps Department
11. Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)
12. Site Reliability Engineering
13. Platform Engineering
14. Platform Engineering
15. 80 %
16. The platform is 80% ready for everything
17. Christin Gorman: Why are you making a new platform?, Copenhagen DevFest 2023 “A platform is a set of tools an IT organization makes for itself”
18. me “Platform engineering is not an evolution of DevOps, it’s the consequence of failed DevOps in failed organizations”
19. Manifesto for Agile Software Development We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
21. Scrum Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) PRINCE2 Agile® Agile Project Management Project-based funding ITSM and ITIL and Tickets Change Advisory Boards Architecture Review Boards
22. Andy Hunt, 1/17 Agile “Agile now means, we do half of Scrum poorly and use Jira.”
23. Loose coupling and micro services
24. Prompt: Photo of 10 grumpy old men sitting around a table with enterprise architecture diagrams on boards all around
27. https://www.pexels.com/photo/ fl are-of- fi re-on-wood-with-black-smokes-57461/
28. Help!
29. Interjection
30. https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=88978&picture=kryptonite
31. Talking about change Planning change Meetings about change Status reports about change Reviews about change Documentation about change Seminars about change Post-it®s about change Everything which is about change but not the actual change
32. Take action
33. Bryan Howard: Not another initiative
34. Agile DevOps Digital Transformation Platform Engineering Continous Delivery
35. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Principle no. 1: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
36. Donovan Brown, Microsoft “DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.” DevOps is anything which does that… Patrick Debois, The Godfather of DevOps
37. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Principle no. 3: “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.” Several times a day
38. The bottom-up approach
 (aka what you can do)
39. Craig Larman: Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior “1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and fi rst-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.”
40. powerOf(Forgiveness) > powerOf(Permission)
41. Ask yourself “What is the fi rst thing we need to change to deliver more value sooner?”
42. Ask yourself “Where is the bottleneck?”
44. Eliyahu M. Goldratt as quoted in The Phoenix Project “Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.”
46. Observation from team “Branches live for weeks and code reviews take forever”
47. Scrum, anyone?
48. Gather
49. Scatter
50. Gather
51. Scatter
52. Integrate
53. Code review request outcome (a)
54. Code review request outcome (b)
55. Blame and fi nger pointing and frowns and it’s all your fault
56. How to fi x Scrum?
57. https://store.epicgames.com/es-ES/p/kill-it-with- fi re
58. Continuous Integration implies Trunk Based Development -> Short lived branches (or no branches) -> Automated testing -> Short review cycles -> Pair programming -> Mob (ensemble) programming
59. Mobbing Four people working to solve a problem One of them is taking notes on a computer Because taking notes is boring, we swap every 15 minutes
60. Mobbing no more standups, no more scrum masters, no more backlog re fi nement, no more code reviews, no more pull requests 😀
61. Mobbing Continuous integration Continuous delivery Fever defects Much shorter MTTR Working on what matters Work in small increments WIP is one Increased developer productivity Increased developer happiness 😀 Mobbing implies TDD or BDD
62. Observation from team “All changes requires involvement from multiple teams working on separate backlogs in multiple repositories”
63. Dependency management at scale
64. Requires coordination and testing and meetings
66. Inner source
67. Monorepo
68. ~6,000 developers Johan Abildskov and Jeppe Brønsted: The Secret (Code) of Uber (Engineering) DevOps Days Aarhus 2025
69. ~6,000 microservices Johan Abildskov and Jeppe Brønsted: The Secret (Code) of Uber (Engineering) DevOps Days Aarhus 2025
70. One Git Repository Johan Abildskov and Jeppe Brønsted: The Secret (Code) of Uber (Engineering) DevOps Days Aarhus 2025
71. Huh?
72. Monorepo https://github.com/ond fi sk/MonorepoDemo
73. Monorepo Code Reusability Easier Collaboration Streamlined Dependency Management Atomic Commits and Releases Improved Testing Security and access management Trust
74. Observation from team “The build takes 30 minutes (2 hours if we include integration tests”
75. All CI pipelines < 10 minutes or else…
76. All CI pipelines < 5 minutes or else…
77. Daniel Raniz Raneland, DevOps Days Zürich 2025 Pipeline Patterns and Antipatterns - Things your Pipeline Should (Not) Do
78. Observation from team “We spend forever discussing estimates and planning details which always end up being wrong”
79. Estimates are waste https://www.pexels.com/da-dk/foto/128421/ #NoEstimates
80. Observation from team “But management says…”
82. https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/purple-cylinder-podium-pedestal-stage-product-display-background-3d-illustration-empty-display-showroom-presentation-product-placement_38565994.htm
83. Building a platform [to build a product] before you build a product is premature optimization
84. Donald Knuth, 1974 “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
85. You’re all di ff erent
86. Focus on the product There are no commonalities No gains from a platform fi rst approach
87. There is a platform already
88. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Principle no. 10: “Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.”
89. Bottom up total
90. Call to action Try mob programming for at least a week Get WIP down to one Move all your code to a monorepo Make builds fast! Stop estimating Build products not platforms
91. The top-down approach
 (what the CEO and CFO can do)
92. <rant>
93. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant%27s_tea_party,_Robur_Tea_Room,_Sydney,_24_March_1939_-_Sam_Hood_(3529604677).jpg
94. AI
95. Adopt AI or loose your job, your business, and/or your life Big tech: Buy our Blockchain Low-code Cloud
97. https://ai2.work/blog/uber-burned-its-entire-ai-budget-in-four-months-here-s-why
98. me “Writing code is not your bottleneck. Until it is, AI will not make you faster or more pro fi table”
99. </rant>
100. Stop the new initiatives
101. nalle in, nalle ut https://www.pexels.com/da-dk/foto/bamse-i-veteranbil-pa-solskinsdag-37400205/
102. about:siloes
103. High impact requires risk and sacri fi ce and blood and guts and money
104. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Principle no. 4: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”
105. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Principle no. 6: “The most ef fi cient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”
106. Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Principle no. 11: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
107. We must take the fi ght to the CEO
108. Joe Peppard, Professor and Academic Director, Michael Smur fi t Graduate Business School, UCD “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department”
109. Evolve the organization
110. IT Operations / SRE Platform Engineering Development Testing Enterprise Architecture Business Size of siloes not to scale Security
111. Self-managed feature team Bring people together
112. Business Unit A Business Unit B Business Unit C
113. https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html Wardley
114. Risky and uncomfortable
115. Robert L. Martin: The Big Lie of Strategic Planning “If you are entirely comfortable with your strategy, there’s a strong chance it isn’t very good.”
116. Rasmus Lystrøm
117. Thank you Blog, slides, SoMe