In next weeks Business901 Podcast, I was prepared for a technical discussion about DevOps, Scrum, and Kanban. Instead, I receive some of the best practical advice about getting started and working with people for any process. The excerpt below is just a small portion of what Shirley Ronen-Harel discussed in our conversation. Shirley is an Agile and Lean Coach and author of two books, Agile Kids and The Coaching Booster.
Podcast Excerpt:
Joe: Operational people, do they understand the Sprint process easily or even Scrum? I mean, is that foreign to them when they move into that process? Does development lead the way or is it a learning curve for both of them? How does that normally work in an organization that you work with? 
Shirly: There is no normally. Each organization has its own personality, but as far as I can tell, I see that they don’t understand and at least in this point of time, they think of themselves as tools people. What are the tools they need to set? At first when I come into an organization and I used to manage DevOps myself, I do some kind of evaluation and start understanding what is this mindset, the organization mindset, what is the level of the agility, because people say they work Scrum, but there are times, they are not. They just have a Sprint in the best case daily, and things are not going so well. So the first place, you’re not taking the Dev people inside. They need to do other things. But let’s say you have a good Scrum inside or type of an Agile, you need to start to involve the Ops people inside this Agile process in a way.
I usually take this maturity model that I find on the internet. There are a lot of maturity models for DevOps on the internet. It’s just the stage for the conversation. It’s not really a good model, but it’s a stage for conversation, starting to let them know that DevOps is more than just tools. It has other dimensions. It has monitoring dimensions, maturity dimension, Agile dimension, process, continuous integration, and what they call CM or change management. When we start talking about it, we start picking up or picking out those things we want to take care of. As a coach, working with them and growing them into the next stages of things that I think they need to know. So, it’s a process, and it’s doable.