It’s Friday, May 19th. We are sitting at the Rome – Ciampino airport with Jan waiting for our flight back home. It was pretty intense week of our presence at two Open DevOps conferences in Milan and Rome, the week full of travelling, meeting lot of people interested in DevOps and of course, great Italian food and coffee! The conferences were organized by our friends at Emerasoft and their partners. Big applause to them for excellent events!

Our job was to run game based workshops that would simply explain and educate what DevOps is, why we need it and what are the basic principles behind it. For that purpose we have designed brand new DevOps game. How did it go? What were our main observations?

One of the main topics out of the conferences relates to the company culture. In Rome we got stuck on the subject already in the morning when we had a table discussion. As you can see, all the speakers were pretty concentrated:

When you are an evangelist of e.g. Agile and DevOps, you get pretty frustrated when your organization resists to adopt it or resists to adopt it right now. There are people afraid to change (why to change it since it has been working this way for 10-20 years) or people too busy (we have other problems to fix) or your management is not in. That all together pretty much creates status quo of your company culture – set of values and beliefs that cause a stereotypical behavior in the company. And then came a question from the audience: “how do you deal with it?”

This is one of the subjects of my interest for more than two decades. And still I think this is not easy to solve. What we observed in practice and also at the conferences, the game based trainings brought people together – finally. We usually hear feedback like: “It felt like after intense team building except we were also able to solve our major problems that we couldn’t solve for many years.” Another feedback the people told us: “It was after long time we felt excitement at work!”

We have got fantastic feedback in Milan as well as Rome. How come? What was the magic? The workshops were based on specifically designed aha-moments, well executed coaching, and team self-experience.

Well, the events are now part of history. But we decide about the future. Now sitting at the airport I take lot of good feelings with me home. Now I’m looking forward to see my family and Czech beer. And another DevOps game session, of course 😉

Arrivederci amici!

PS / You can check out our trip in pictures: https://goo.gl/photos/AJZVrgwVoTm8kNR47