DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • DevOps Chats
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Communities
    • AWS Community Hub
    • CloudBees
    • IT as Code
    • Rocket on DevOps.com
    • Traceable on DevOps.com
    • Quali on DevOps.com
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Digital Anarchist
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DevSecOps
  • Leadership Suite
  • Practices
  • ROELBOB
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps

Home » Blogs » DevOps Practice » DevOps and Systems Thinking: The Farmer, His Tractor and Olive Garden

DevOps and Systems Thinking

DevOps and Systems Thinking: The Farmer, His Tractor and Olive Garden

By: Logan Daigle on August 23, 2018 1 Comment

As a DevOps and Agile consultant, I work with many technology leaders who see DevOps as this big tangled mess of which they are trying to make sense. When I talk to them, I have to teach them to lead in a systems-thinking manner, a key tenet of DevOps. Making sense of systems thinking is no easy task, but to make it a little simpler, let’s tell a tale of farm-to-table that includes the characters of tractor, farmer and popular Italian restaurant Olive Garden.

Related Posts
  • DevOps and Systems Thinking: The Farmer, His Tractor and Olive Garden
  • 5 Things DevOps is Not
  • Why “Enterprise DevOps” Doesn’t Make Sense
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps Practice
    Related Topics
  • continuous improvement
  • devops
  • systems thinking
Show more
Show less

A tractor is at the very most multi-purpose—it can till the field, spread fertilizer, pull a trailer to return a harvest, etc. The farmer, on the other hand, might be interested in things such as the acidity of the soil, water levels and local weather forecasts, but his ultimate goal is singular (to produce a yield of crops) and his domain expertise is narrow.

DevOps Connect:DevSecOps @ RSAC 2022

Let’s say this particular farm provides tomatoes to Olive Garden. Olive Garden views the relationship between farmer and tractor from a completely different perspective. It cares about purchasing tomatoes to add in a variety of dishes, and cares much more about getting the tomatoes delivered to the store than how those ingredients were produced. After these tomatoes leave the farm, they become part of a complex process of delivering quality ingredients to the plates of customers.

Now that the picture has been painted, let’s pretend that the farmer is really a member of the development team, the tractor is Jenkins, and Olive Garden represents the leadership team or their business priorities. The farmer, or developer, is thinking very narrowly and tactically. Jenkins, or the tractor, can’t prove the farmer is moving business value from one end to the other. Contrastingly, leadership wants to see everything done in a holistic way, connected to metrics and business value. This scenario leaves farmers and Olive Garden working in silos and thinking differently about how to reach goals. Sound familiar?

This is where systems thinking, or holistic thinking, can help unite leadership and technical teams, improving culture, customer satisfaction and more. So, how do we get from this blasé transaction of tomatoes to table (or code to customer)? In general, if we only focus tactically on what we’re trying to accomplish, we aren’t thinking holistically. Holistic thinking means looking at the entire delivery toolchain and how a single piece of code ultimately will affect the end user or customer.

The goal of leadership is to try to drive vision and to make decisions based on real data. Developers need to try to prove to leadership, especially when they start talking about tools, automation or cultural changes, that there’s going to be value in those initiatives. Sounds easy enough, but sometimes leadership doesn’t provide a good vision for how they want developers to think outside of the box, and so, they’re stuck. We’ve seen this picture before. We have DevOps engineers that are just another silo in the process; not intentionally, but because leadership doesn’t set a good vision. Systems thinking isn’t in place.

As a consultant for Agile teams, I often see Agile and DevOps mixed together. And what I don’t agree with is that the intersection point is small; that’s a common misconception. But when we want to think outside of the box, we need to focus on ideas and capabilities and we need to be able to make data-driven decisions.

So, what is the intersection of Agile and DevOps? Agile is just a component of DevOps. DevOps is the extension of Lean and other methodologies that came before it. In other words, Agile and DevOps can’t live without each other. In organizations that are trying to do both, I’m coaching them to try to utilize both frameworks and both cultures to do what they need because they’re ultimately the same.

Providing a taste of data-driven DevOps to leaders is how to get them to turn their head in the direction that you want it to go.

Ultimately, systems thinking breeds continuous improvement because, if you have a holistic view, you’re monitoring all parts of your process, and so you can have more meaningful retrospectives and you’re thinking about what you can improve all along the way. And you’re on a journey to make your organization, or your team or yourself, epic.

— Logan Daigle

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps Practice Tagged With: continuous improvement, devops, systems thinking

Sponsored Content
Featured eBook
DevOps: Mastering the Human Element

DevOps: Mastering the Human Element

While building constructive culture, engaging workers individually and helping staff avoid burnout have always been organizationally demanding, they are intensified by the continuous, always-on notion of DevOps.  When we think of work burnout, we often think of grueling workloads and deadline pressures. But it also has to do with mismatched ... Read More
« The Struggles DevOps Administrators are Up Against
Predictive QA: Why Performance is so Important in a ‘Big Data’ World »

TechStrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Continuous Deployment
Monday, July 11, 2022 - 1:00 pm EDT
Using External Tables to Store and Query Data on MinIO With SQL Server 2022
Tuesday, July 12, 2022 - 11:00 am EDT
Goldilocks and the 3 Levels of Cardinality: Getting it Just Right
Tuesday, July 12, 2022 - 1:00 pm EDT

Latest from DevOps.com

Rust in Linux 5.20 | Deepfake Hiring Fraud | IBM WFH ‘New Normal’
June 30, 2022 | Richi Jennings
Moving From Lift-and-Shift to Cloud-Native
June 30, 2022 | Alexander Gallagher
The Two Types of Code Vulnerabilities
June 30, 2022 | Casey Bisson
Common RDS Misconfigurations DevSecOps Teams Should Know
June 29, 2022 | Gad Rosenthal
Quick! Define DevSecOps: Let’s Call it Development Security
June 29, 2022 | Don Macvittie

Get The Top Stories of the Week

  • View DevOps.com Privacy Policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Download Free eBook

DevOps: Mastering the Human Element
DevOps: Mastering the Human Element

Most Read on DevOps.com

Rust in Linux 5.20 | Deepfake Hiring Fraud | IBM WFH ‘New No...
June 30, 2022 | Richi Jennings
Chip-to-Cloud IoT: A Step Toward Web3
June 28, 2022 | Nahla Davies
The Two Types of Code Vulnerabilities
June 30, 2022 | Casey Bisson
Common RDS Misconfigurations DevSecOps Teams Should Know
June 29, 2022 | Gad Rosenthal
Quick! Define DevSecOps: Let’s Call it Development Security
June 29, 2022 | Don Macvittie

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2022 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.