Category: Opinion
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Let’s make work outside business hours the exception
When I wrote my blog post about important features of a service management tool, I wrote “I am increasingly coming to believe that the change management process is perhaps the most important one for success in ITIL – not to mention DevOps – adoption” – and I stand by that assessment. Not because change management…
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A long career ahead
I celebrated my 35th birthday this past week. As I was getting ready for work one morning, I looked into the mirror and realised that – barring some drastic, and highly unrealistic, changes in approaches to retirement – I will likely be part of the work force for (at least) as long as I have…
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Thoughts on single piece flow in IT support
My first IT job was a one day per week internship with a pharmaceutical company while I attended my last year of high school. It was the first time I was exposed to the constant stream of support and service calls that makes up a large part of the day to day life of a…
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The value of Kanban
Kanban (capital-K, as in the method) uses a kanban (lowercase-k, as in the board) to visualise and reduce work in progress (WIP for short). This is the most well-known, and visible, part of Kanban. It is achieved by limiting how many pieces of WIP any one work centre can have assigned. At first glance, this may…
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The problem with inept recruiters
I am, with surprising regularity, contacted by recruiters seeking to fill a position. While many of them call out specific aspects of my LinkedIn profile, indicating that they’ve at least taken a cursory glance at it, I am finding an increasing number of recruiters who, quite clearly, has not even bothered to do that. Here…
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Change Management: It’s not about gatekeeping
This was originally written before I read chapter 18 of the DevOps handbook. I feel strongly that peer review has greater legitimacy and chances of success than a system where a change manager is solely responsible for changes that may or may not fall within their area of expertise. It further grants employees more agency…
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Primary Occupational Interests debunked?
Like me, I’m sure you’ve been subjected to tests designed to find out what profession you should pursue. Whether termed professional aptitude tests or primary occupational interests tests, I have long been skeptical of the value of the results these tests offer up. A study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior seems to indicate that I…
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A basic understanding of DevOps
Just over a month ago, I wrote that DevOps is not another way to say cloud. I further argued that anyone who thinks the two are interchangeable certainly doesn’t understand the former (and probably not the latter, either). That, however, raises the question, What is DevOps? As you might guess from my last post on the…
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Graduating!
Over the years, my studies have inspired a number of posts here on the blog, and for good reason. Learning has been a significant inspiration for me on a number of areas. Sharing what I have learned and how that has affected my thinking on a number of areas has been a useful part of…
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The supposed incompatibility between DevOps and ITIL
I have, for some time now, been reading up on DevOps. One thing that, for some reason, keeps coming up, is that people seem to think that there is a fundamental incompatibility between DevOps and ITIL. The more I read, however, the more it becomes clear that there is no disparity at all between them. If…
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DevOps is not code for cloud
Since I started really reading up on DevOps, I wanted to see what the job market for DevOps was like. The results were less than exciting. Though the search term DevOps returned a fair number of results, none of the listings demonstrated an understanding of what DevOps is. What they demonstrated was the fact that…