An outsider's perspective from the inside

As was previously stated, not everyone noticed the attrition within the organization—luckily, a few observant souls did. A small number of the ACME team's members were aware things are not great and decided to step back and look at things from an outsider's perspective. They then started to see the issues within the overall process as clear as day and became determined to expose these issues for all to see. In addition, they decided to sort the issues out—there was just the small problem of how to do this while everyone was going at full pelt to get software delivered at all costs in their own silos with their own problems.

At first, they invested a vast amount of personal time into investigating and building rough and ready tools, including build and test automation, Continuous Integration (CI), a continuous-deployment pipeline, and system-monitoring solutions. The intention was to automate as many parts of the broken process as possible to reduce the pain. They also applied energies evangelizing within their technically-focused peer groups. Although their ideas and suggestions were welcomed by the majority, there was not the appetite to adopt these new-fangled tools—everyone was far too busy trying to ship software within the broken process. They needed another way.

They decided that they needed some assistance, so they sought out a like-minded manager with influence within the wider business who could help them get some much-needed traction. After much cajoling, discussions, and pleading, the manager agreed to help them to obtain budget to form a small team focusing on advancing the CD and DevOps tooling. The newly-formed team's members spent a few months identifying and breaking down the immediate and most painful issues, and built, installed, and implemented tooling to remove some of the pain—to ease the adoption, many of the tools are bespoke to fit into the existing processes. 

This went some way to address the broken process but the reality is that the tools did not have the impact they envisaged. In fact, the tools themselves needed to be altered so much to fit the existing process that they started to become unreliable and too complex, so much so that those who were originally behind the approach started to question the validity of their decisions. 

Ultimately, there is a much bigger issue that tooling cannot address—the culture of the organization itself, the behaviors of those within it, and the many disjointed methods of communication between the disconnected silos that had formed over the years. It became obvious that all the tools and tea in China will not bring pain relief; something more drastic was needed.

The team's members refocused and soon realized that it's not the tools that need to change to fit the process, but the process and ways of working that needs to change. If this was addressed, the tools could simply be taken off the shelf—so to speak—and used without extensive modification. The team's members have to drastically change their direction, become less technology-focused, and act more like agents for business change. They then highlighted this now-obvious fact to as many people as they can up and down the organization while the influential manager worked to obtain backing from the senior leadership to implement far-reaching business change. Luckily, their reputation and standing within the organization was such that getting backing was easy.

We're now going on to the third stage of the evolution, where things start to come back together and the ACME team regains their ability to deliver quality software when it is needed.