Why are you solving other organisation's problems?

I often find myself asking why an organisation is solving another's problems. It gets a perplexed look or two and, if delivered without any continued explanation, dismissed.

So let me explain myself. You'll likely have heard of 'brownfields' - most often used in an ICT context to reference a business domain with existing problems.

You'll often hear about how other organisations have optimised in these contexts, held up as exemplars that you too can learn from. But hold up. Are your brownfields problems the same? And even if you share some of their problems, the chances of you sharing the complex interactions of their problems are highly unlikely. Same with the chances of their solutions working exactly for you.

Unless of course the solution is founded on understanding your current context and solving for it. And that is a strength of DevOps.

Building on the Theory of Constraints and ideas coming from systems thinking, DevOps allows you to solve your problems and optimise for your context.

It is very much based on feedback loops that allow for continued and targeted improvement coupled with strong metrics.

However, as DevOps becomes more widely adopted, that fluid approach itself now risks getting replaced with dogma: You must implement test-automation; You must move your environments to the cloud; You must release updated features to production within a day.

Don't get me wrong - depending on where you’re finding bottlenecks in your own value-stream, some of these might make sense for you. But it is important that you solve your own problems – don't let the journey define your destination.