DevOpsChat Special Guests: Ryan Bryers and Adrian Hepworth
We are delighted that Ryan Bryers and Adrian Hepworth will be joining us for a DevOpsChat where we will discuss the role that collaboration tooling plays in DevOps. You can see the questions we will be discussing at the bottom of this page.
Ryan Bryers is the CTO for Worldline UK&I where he is focused on Digital Transformation, Agile Enablement and Cloud Adoption whilst also managing and evolving operational speed solutions.
Adrian Hepworth is the Chief Architect for Worldline UK&I where he is responsible for architecture principles and delivery practices within the Worldline digital product business. He also maintains partnership links with technology suppliers, SMEs and the open source community as well as being a member of the UK government open standards board.
Video Interview
In this video interview Ryan and Adrian shared with us some of their views on why collaboration matters, which tools deliver results and how to get started:
Questions for this DevOpsChat
- Q1: What are the benefits of improved collaboration?
- Q2: What is your favourite collaboration tool and why?
- Q3: What challenges may be faced by organisations wishing to use new collaboration tools?
- Q4: Do teams need to be co-located if they are to be highly collaborative?
- Q5: How is the choice of collaboration tools influenced by whether a team is co-located or distributed?
- Q6: Does our education system equip people to use modern collaboration tools?
Hi David,
This looks like a great set of questions for tonight’s chat, I’m sure people will be coming up with some great answers during the day today ready for 8pm.
To hopefully stimulate the chat a little more tonight following the video Adrian and I did yesterday I have a few thoughts below:
Adrian made a great point in the video, don’t narrow your focus on what a collaboration tool is. Yes Confluence, Jira, Google Docs, Trello etc are very much in the centre of the collaboration space but tools even as wide as Git, Chef, Docker, Puppet etc should be considered collaboration tools. You can collaborate in words, in code, in scripts and so on. I’ve clipped this definition off the web for collaboration “the action of working with someone to produce something”. What Adrian was saying in the video was that collaboration is about people using common tools to share something (information, code, scripts, executables etc) but you share them from a common place/space and hopefully use them in a common manner.
Over my time in IT (24-years) I’ve seen complete co-location, the beginnings of distribution between buildings on the same site, distribution of people across the UK, the use of 3rd parties in different offices, offshoring, nearshoring, onshoring and the start of SME’s with co-location based on the Agile Manifesto. Co-location of all people (business to IT) is clearly the best approach but not always viable so the challenge becomes how can you get as close to the feeling of co-location with the use of tools when you are distributed? Does simply buying the best tool sort your problem or do you need to understand the people, how to use the tool and even the consideration of (underlying) infrastructure influence your thinking? How distributed is your need for collaboration, across buildings, across cities, across regions, across countries or across continents ? Does the distance and boundaries your cross (timezone, culture etc) influence your approach to collaboration and the tooling?
Finally I spent a lot of time in Q2 this year talking about Digital Immigrants versus Digital Natives (see some of that on http://ryanbryersdigital.blogspot.co.uk/). Part of the material I used was about teachers in schools being Digital Immigrants and students being Digital Natives. Immigrants would probably think email is great, Natives would snub their nose at that and look to social media (public and enterprise). Immigrants have made their peace with SMS and Whatsapp and various messengers whereas Natives are pushing the boundaries with Snapchat, vQuick and similar tools. So is the education system turning people out into the business world equipped for the Digital Native world or are the Digital Immigrant teachers holding back the Digital Natives with skills in tools like Office that really we seek to move away from due to their lack of high paced and visible collaboration. If you get a CV from a graduate claiming expertise in Office and another claiming expertise in Confluence which one grabs your attention ?
See you all tonight.
Ryan