Why There’s A Downward Spiral And How We Can Break It
Summary
The downward spiral is costly to companies financially and to workers’ moral and confidence, and it happens to all companies, but we can break the downward spiral by introducing DevOps.
Why There’s A Downward Spiral And How We Can Break It
The downward spiral is experienced in all companies, whether they realise it’s happening or not. But why does it happen? The downward spiral occurs mostly because of opposing goals in company departments, but also because companies fail to recognise that IT is at the centre of their business, no matter what their business is.
The effect the downward spiral has
The biggest cost of the downward spiral is to our workers, the human beings who have to deal with the consequences. When the downward spiral goes on for years, as it usually does, people feel trapped within it and failure feels inevitable, draining moral and making workers feel powerless and cynical. This in turn makes us feel that we have no control over the outcome of our work and projects. When we feel stuck in this spiral we develop an attitude of hopelessness and we are less likely to try something we know would help, but that is doomed to failure because of the system we work within. The second effect the downward spiral is having is financial. The cost of the downward spiral is huge and if we consider that employing DevOps can half waste and increase productivity, we can see just how beneficial it is.
How to break the downward spiral
If we bring IT Operations into the regular working day instead of them working out of business hours to deploy code, we have everyone working together. This creates a routine and customers don’t notice the difference. This means everyone can see the effects of changes and fixes, tests can be run, and everyone can see that this is working. It will take mere minutes for developers to discover mistakes and fix them, rather than these things being found months down the line. This makes everyone feel productive and brings departments together in a common goal. It also means everyone is constantly learning and we can see the results of our continued education happening in real time. What we are really doing here is collaborating. This creates trust between departments and everyone feels able to talk about problems because they know issues will be fixed quickly and with everyone’s input and understanding.
The blame game
Amid this culture of trust we are building, we don’t assign blame for mistakes. This is a big step forward as blame is one of the reasons workers have traditionally been afraid to raise the issue of mistakes. We do seek to understand what went wrong so we can learn from it, but so we can ALL learn from it. In fact, we input faults on purpose in this system so we can understand failure. We don’t wait for this to happen by accident, but we work on predicting what couldgo wrong so we can prevent it. This create resilience and easier improvement. This serves to mean workers now have confidence and as we see the company we work for, and that we feel a part of, succeed, we have pride.