Team Topologies graphics repo

As a big fan of Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais’s Team Topologies book, I was excited when Emma Button pointed me toward this awesome repo of Team Topologies graphics/icons for all of your favorite tools (including paper!).

January 30, 2024 · 1 min · 37 words · Rob Cummings

Common CIO request- What should I focus on?

Lately, the most common request I get from CIOs is about what they should focus on and what other companies are doing that they should be getting a start on. I have the same answer for most of them. The biggest unlock they can provide is not centered around a technology or specific process. It’s around viewing technology delivery as a sociotechnical problem space to be holistically optimized. This means (over time) shifting the entire technology and product organization to become a value stream-aligned org with a pull-through work model (vs. submitting tickets and pushing into a queue). Do this by centering team models around four types, as outlined in the book “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais: ...

December 4, 2023 · 2 min · 351 words · Rob Cummings

Leveraging the cloud to modernize applications

I participated in a panel discussion with Fedscoop about how government agencies are using the public cloud to modernize. Read more here: FedScoop YouTube

April 24, 2023 · 1 min · 24 words · Rob Cummings

Settlers of DevOps - Down with the Tyranny of Architecture Governance

Introduction All sorts of reasons are used to justify Enterprise Architecture. At the top of the list is usually a desire for high efficiency and minimization of risk. In other words, Enterprise Architecture knows best. We repeatedly end up in the model because, ultimately, you can’t have the wild west in large technology organizations. Or…can you? Yes you can, with Simon Wardley’s Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners model. Take advantage of organizational theft to ensure amazing people in each of these three groups contribute to increasing the velocity and on-going sustainability of your organization. While many know about this model, the mechanics (like theft, exciting!) are counter intuitive and it is often understandably difficult to relate this to real-world problems. ...

February 3, 2018 · 1 min · 197 words · Rob Cummings

The DevOps Roller Coaster

Introduction I had the privilege of supporting two teams this past year, one that was an operations team learning development practices, and a development team that was discovering operations while introducing continuous delivery. Both approached Chef from different viewpoints, but in the end were united by this common tool set. This talk, given at ChefConf 2014, covers what I wish I had known a year ago about leading change (with specific examples), including: ...

May 1, 2014 · 1 min · 117 words · Rob Cummings

ChefConf 2013 Keynote - Level Up Your Change

Introduction I had the honor of delivering one of the ChefConf 2013 keynotes. It was my first time speaking at a conference and although I was extremely nervous at the beginning, it was great fun and I learned a ton. This talk discussed the challenges of trying to push a fundamental or disruptive change into large organizations, why it is difficult, why that is actually a good thing, and then showed one way to go about it along with two real-life examples from Nordstrom. ...

April 28, 2013 · 1 min · 86 words · Rob Cummings