Selling Agile/CD/DevOps

This was a session about selling agile/devops/cd to either other companies (for the consultants) or within the company. Not only selling but promoting further once sold.

Things we covered:

• Straight off a few people recommended The Pheonix Project. One of us made a habit of buying several copies and putting it on people's desks to combat how hard it is to get people to go out and read things (let alone buy them). Pheonix is very easy reading and gets the DevOps/Lean point across very well to a wide range of IT people.
• Haunting the CEO was another recommended read when trying to win over CXO levels (pdf couldn't be added due to spam filters!)
• The increasing importance of organizational change was recognized
• BiModal IT was a left of centre addition. The argument was made that the addition of a framework that included those who found themselves in situations where only waterfall would work (due to too many legacy/business constraints) reduced the weight of naysayers and provided a resistance reduced path for those areas that could be agile enabled. The Cynefin framework was a good way to determine which mode suited which situation - there's a good YouTube intro on this (couldn't add it due to spam filter :( )
• It was argued that the sale of risk reduction works better over the promise of future benefit. At least in Perth! People have so much on their plate they're more interested in things that will reduce the size of that plate rather than add "one more opportunity" to the range of things they need to deal with.
• When selling CD try to do so with small wins in areas that are chosen to be easy CD wins. Some CD challenges can be huge and striking for the toughest one because it offers the most value may be a mistake as the company will run out of patience before you can show the benefit.