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Predictability is important, OK we get it.
But how do you achieve it?
Amusingly, many people seem to start with step 2: doing something about it.
How about we start with step 1 instead: figuring out what makes predictability.
What makes you feel safe, confident, protected?
There are many sources of predictability, or unpredictability:
- your coworkers
- your processes
- the technology that drives the processes
- your organisation
- …and: yourself
But all of these elements can be subsumed under the process itself: because what is a process but an agreement to transform something into something else.
And that transformation is what, in the end, must be predictable.
This may sound obvious, yet it’s a mental step I often witness people not actually take.
By understanding what you expect from your process in terms of results, not activities, gives you the mental freedom to see things for what they are, and the creativity to improve the results, not the activities.
If your coworker is liable to forget something, you can pester them to be less forgetful (but believe me, they’re trying as hard as they can already) – or you can find ways to make their forgetfulness less of an issue: through automation, for example. Or through re-arranging the process.
Everybody will feel so much better about it. Your results will improve. Your stress levels will decrease.
If you’ve wondered, by the way, if there’s a third step as well: there is.
DevOps is about creating feedback loops, remember? So you should find ways to examine your process. That way you can see if there has been change, and gauge the success of your actions.
And once you’ve got such a feedback loop in place, it’ll feel very natural for you to experiment and tweak; to adapt to your situation and find even better ways.
…and what do you know: these things we just talked about, taken together, are nothing but Gene Kim’s three ways.