251: People Practices in Digital Transformations with Gurushyam Mony
with Gurushyam Mony
Director · DevOps and Quality Engineering at Markel
April 28, 2019 
Hosted by Joe Colantonio 
About this episode
DevOps and Agility are only successful if your team continues to practice them every day, every hour, every minute. But how do you achieve this type of whole-team approach? In this episode, Gurushyam Mony shares some of his top practices for helping companies with their digital transformations and explains that people are as vital an aspect of this as tools are. So listen up and discover some real-world tips on how to make your people the key to your company’s digital transformation success story.
Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk with Gurushyam Mony
- To me, there are two ways to show the art of the possibility to people who have done certain practice in a certain way. And I believe if the self-realization for people doesn't kick in no matter how much of effort you put in for marketing and showcasing all these newer practices that can give value it is going to be tough for people within teams to embrace that and start practicing them.
- I think you have to take two separate approaches to convince people at various different management levels. Making someone's life more efficient, better elevating their talent elevating how they do things to the next level is always something that would work on your engineering side your bottom up layers of your teams and all that, But from a top-down if you have to convince and get buy-in from the leadership which I would always say should happen either in parallel or should have already happened before you start your bottom-up approach.
- So the eternal predicament of the triangle of cost, quality, and time. I mean if you have done a large house construction project or any massive undertaking in real life you always get yourself in the conundrum if I want to reduce the cost my quality of what is going to be done on my house is going to be low. Or I can say I want the top materials in my house which are going to increase the cost and increase the time of the project as well. So there are a lot of people who juggle this in an everyday life without even realizing that they do. And it's a fine balance to reach to not be stuck with only two of them. So typically people would go. Sure we want delivery to happen within six months. So they've already put a hard date on time. So then they cannot pick both cost and quality at the same time along with reduced time. One will have to give at the end of the day.
- Most people who start on the DevOps journey they start to say that let's invest in tools because the tools are going to help us go faster. So they'll say we have been doing all of this manual testing, manual build, manual deploy so let's go ahead and invest some money to procure tools. Now tools also cost money and they cost a lot of maintenance work and efforts and all that. So they end up actually procuring all of those they end up putting all of this in place yet to see that the costs just got bloated up. They got more efficiency they got things automated. However, the costs just went up from what they were doing before. Not because of the people cost but the technology cost.
- Typically teams should first come to an agreement of what they orchestrated by planned delivery mechanism is and they should lay that out as building blocks and you should focus on all of those boxes in an incremental way rather than going a mile deep on one of the boxes.
- My one piece of actionable advice is never to stop reflecting back at what you do and improving by way of thinking out of the box because you're only as good as your last hour.
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