My friends at JumpCloud asked me to contribute to an Ebook they wrote on “Doing More Faster now with IT control”. The idea was to take the concept made famous by David Cohen and Brad Feld in a book and as the mantra for Techstars and apply it specifically to IT. I was part of an all star team, each assigned to write a section. Gene Kim, Ben Kepes, Tony Bradley and Raj Bhargava each contributed. My section is on BYOD. Gene Kim writes about DevOps (no surprise there), Ben writes about hybrid organizations.
But I don’t write this article to blow my own horn about writing a chapter in a book (maybe just a little). Rather I read Brad Feld’s blog post on it today and as much of what Brad writes, it made me think. As Brad said doing more faster generally is a good thing. But as the saying goes, “speed kills”. Going faster can spawn a cascade of other issues. Dealing with them is often the key to success. On that note Brad calls out three things about organizations who successfully do more faster:
- They decentralized decision making
- They push the pace of their product development by more closely aligning with customers
- They create a culture of action
In terms of DevOps, isn’t in many ways the idea of doing more faster core to it? So to me doing more faster is as much a mantra in DevOps as it is at Techstars. I don’t know the idea that IT wants to do more faster is just natural to me. But again on Brad’s blog I was reminded that is not the belief of everyone. There was one comment on the blog when I read it today:
