Enhancing Team Dynamics and Psychological Safety in DevOps with Brittany Woods

Britney Woods' Experience and Insights on DevOps

• Britney Woods has worked in various industries within the tech sector, including retail, finance, and the weight industry.
• She began her career as an engineer in the infrastructure space, transitioning to automation, cloud engineering, and eventually leadership roles.

Leadership and Psychological Safety in DevOps

• Woods emphasizes that DevOps is a broad methodology, and companies can adopt it in ways that suit their specific needs.
• She highlights the importance of psychological safety in DevOps, which allows engineers to experiment and innovate without fear of repercussions.
• Woods believes that psychological safety is crucial for enabling teams to step out of their comfort zones and embrace new challenges.
• She emphasizes the role of trust in fostering psychological safety, stating that leaders must demonstrate their commitment to this principle through their actions and words.
• Building trust within a team is crucial for fostering psychological safety. This involves demonstrating support for team members, especially during challenging situations like failed experiments.
• Leaders should encourage experimentation and learning, providing space for engineers to explore new concepts and areas.
• It is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable taking risks and making mistakes without fear of punishment.
• Leaders should be mindful of cognitive overload and strive to reduce it by prioritizing tasks and setting clear working agreements.
• Senior engineers can play a vital role in mentoring junior engineers, helping them grow and develop their skills.
• Encouraging senior engineers to take on a mentorship role can help them develop empathy and understanding for those less experienced.
• By emphasizing the importance of mentorship, leaders can help senior engineers recognize their role in fostering the next generation of engineers.

The Evolution of Team Composition

• The composition of teams has changed significantly in recent years, with the rise of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Platform Engineering.
• Platform Engineering teams are diverse, with software engineers, infrastructure engineers, and automation specialists. They focus on building platforms to enable other teams, such as development teams, to solve problems and achieve their goals.
• Development teams are also more diverse, with engineers from various backgrounds, including software development, testing, and QA analysis. This diversity allows for faster delivery and improved quality.

The Importance of Explicit Conversations about Ways of Working

• The shift in team composition has led to a need for more explicit conversations about ways of working.
• These conversations help build trust and psychological safety by allowing engineers to set expectations for themselves and others.
• Engineers can share their experience, expertise, and preferred ways of working, creating a foundation for effective collaboration.
• This approach helps to address potential feelings of inferiority among team members with different backgrounds and experiences.
• The ways of working conversations extend beyond individual teams, fostering communication and understanding between teams within an organization.

Measuring Team Performance and Fostering Growth

• It is important to tie team efforts back to the organization's strategic imperatives, showing how individual contributions contribute to the larger goals.
• Metrics for measuring team performance vary depending on the team's role and function.
• For platform teams, adoption is a key metric, as it indicates the value and usefulness of the platform.
• Development teams can measure build times and time to delivery to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
• Team health checks are crucial for assessing psychological safety, delivery performance, and overall team well-being.
• Creating opportunities for learning and growth involves making space for team members to pursue their development, such as dedicated learning time or knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Weekly knowledge-sharing sessions can foster mentorship, build team skills, and prevent the formation of silos within the team.

The Future of Teams and the Role of Generative AI

• The speaker believes that the future of teams will involve further breaking down existing methodologies like DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering into more specialized functions.
• The speaker argues that DevOps was an umbrella methodology that has been broken down into more specific areas like SRE and platform engineering.
• The speaker believes that generative AI will play a significant role in the future of engineering, but it will not replace engineers entirely.
• The speaker sees generative AI as a tool that can help engineers by automating tasks, reducing cognitive load, and improving code quality.
• The speaker believes that generative AI will help engineers focus more on client and end-user experience.

Connecting with Britney Woods

• The speaker encourages viewers to connect with them on Blue Sky, LinkedIn, and their personal blog, BrittanyWoods.com.