This article borrows heavily from the seminal article by John Allspaw, then CEO at Etsy. Though based on a technology company’s successful approach to handling failures and accidents, it can be easily applied to ministry. I basically replaced engineers with volunteers and like paint on primer, it became an article about handling issues in ministry.
My parents recently spent some time with me, about 6 months to be precise. It was great. They enjoyed spending time with their grandkids, and we both enjoyed seeing each other frequently at length for the first time in 17 years. Besides the expected frictions of such an extended stay, one thing kept bothering me with my verbal interactions with my parents.
We’ve kicked off DevOps transformation in the last few months and recently we started getting some feedback coming in. For example, “We’re not seeing anything.” The initial reaction was to intensify the publicity and branding, but thankfully cooler heads prevailed, and we stuck to our game plan. DevOps and Agile go hand-in-hand, like lightning and thunder. You see one, and hear (and even feel) the other. And that’s not saying the Agile transformation is all flash. It just means that not seeing “anything” doesn’t mean something isn’t happening.