I’ve been pondering how language is such an important part of making DevOps succeed.
Or of making it fail.
That’s because with carefully chosen language, leaders can make new approaches really palpable to their team. They can make it easy to understand, desirable to follow, take away perceived risks.
Or they can do essentially the opposite: put lipstick on the pig, use fancy new words and continue with their usual dysfunction and avoid accountability.
It’s really interesting to me. You might increase accountability by implementing the actual ideas of DevOps – or you might shirk accountability but merely using DevOps as a prop.
To me, that’s yet more proof that DevOps is about people and interaction foremost, everything else pretty much follows from there.
It’s an extremely strong sign that you need to be really careful about how you communicate. A botched Jenkins install won’t doom a DevOps initiative at your company. A botched explanation just might.