What if you could have a ‘playbook’ that could guide you thru the complexities and nuances of adopting DevOps, at enterprise scale? Much like a sports team’s playbook outlining its winning plays, my new book— ‘The DevOps Adoption Playbook’ is your business resource for knowing the ‘rules of the game’. Important information for every organization adopting DevOps to know, whether you are a practitioner or a part of the leadership.
For the past four years, as IBM’s lead client facing DevOps SME, I have had the opportunity to work with dozens of clients across industries, geography and size; across IT maturity, organizational structures and ability to invest; across business goals of optimization and innovation; across compliance and regulatory needs. I just did not have a front row seat to these organization’s journey of adopting DevOps, but was on the field with them, helping them navigate their DevOps Adoption journey– as a player, team captain and (mostly) a coach. Thru these experiences, I have documented a series of repeatable patterns of success (and anti-patterns too). I have captured these in my new book ‘The DevOps Adoption Playbook’. Like a sports team’s playbook, it is a guide that you can leverage – whether you are a practitioner (player), project leader (captain), transformation leader (coach) or an executive (general manager). The book is written as a series of ‘Plays’ you can pick from for your team to execute based on your business and technology needs. The book is peppered throughout with sports analogies and stories (that I love) to help with making a point, and hopefully making for a more fun and enjoyable reading process.
I have been presenting these ‘plays’ for the past two years to clients in briefings and workshops, and at IBMs InterConnect conference. In fact, it was it was during one of these client workshops around 18 months ago that a client who was in the audience suggested that my set of best practices were like a ‘playbook’ they could use for their own DevOps journey. There and then was born the idea of publishing the plays as a book. Last summer, I met with IBM Press and Wiley and the book was on its way. It has been a wondrous journey putting the book together as it gave me an opportunity to really step back and think and ponder about how to best present not just my personal experiences working with clients adopting DevOps, but those of several IBMers who also lead and coach clients thru such adoptions, or are leading IBMs own DevOps Adoption journey. I have done my best to acknowledge all these IBMers, business partners and client leaders who have influenced my learning and refining of these plays over the years. Please do look up the list of acknowledgements in the introduction of the book. These are the giants who’s shoulders I stood on while putting the book together.
One of the most difficult tasks I faced while writing the book was deciding what to leave out– the level of depth one could go to, based on myriad experiences and examples, could have easily doubled the length of the book. All that content is still with me and I will be over time posting it on the companion website for the book, at– http://devopsadoptionplaybook.com. I am also starting a Video Blog to accompany the book, as a way to make the content more interactive. It will be launching on the same website in early March, just in time for IBM InterConnect.
The book is available to order today! If you order The DevOps Adoption Playbook today, you can get a 35% discount using code VBN25 when ordering at www.wiley.com/buy/9781119308744.
About the author/ Sanjeev Sharma
Sanjeev Sharma, CTO and Distinguished Engineer – DevOps Technical Sales and Adoption, IBM Cloud Unit, is a 20-year veteran of the software industry with expertise in DevOps, mobile development and UX, lean and agile transformation, application lifecycle management and software supply chains. He is a DevOps thought leader at IBM and speaks regularly at conferences. He has written several papers and is the author of the “DevOps for Dummies” book.