Configuration Management Working Group

Upcoming Events

Tuesday
30 May 2017

Doors open at 6:00 p.m.
Start at 6:30 p.m.
**** Please RSVP by Noon Tuesday, 30 May 2017 via our RSVP form ****

Meeting Location

Sully District Governmental Center, 4900 Stonecroft Boulevard, Chantilly, VA., 20151

Meeting Agenda:

General Announcements
- Bring $15 for dinner to be collected at the door or pay via PayPal to jeff@parnes.net. We can only accept cash, check (or Paypal). As usual, it will be a dinner you'll enjoy
- Dinner to be catered by Cholito Chicken, We believe in our taste: Cholito Chicken is delighted to introduce their family recipe in every plate. Carefully combining various ingredient and Peruvian spices to create our wonderful rotisserie chickens as well as all of our Peruvian plates.
Audience Introductions
- Name
- Company
- Looking for job (always bring resumes)
- Looking for new hires
- CM info exchange
Topic - Decoding Culture: Beyond the Fluff and Back to Business

We've all heard culture is vital to creating and sustaining a healthy organization. It was even Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year in 2014. We also know culture is notoriously hard to describe in a meaningful way. Even harder than describing culture is demonstrating its contribution to organizational performance.
Culture's importance is reinforced in the DevOps movement as the “C” in “CALMS” – one of the key aspects of DevOps. Culture also shapes how an organization shares information – “sharing” being the “S” in “CALMS” and another key aspect of DevOps.
But for all its importance, we've had few tools and limited research to describe or quantify culture.
Or so we thought. Work from Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Sydney Dekker, Dr. Ron Westrum, and the State of DevOps Reports is all contributing to our understanding of culture and how it impacts the performance of an organization and its people.
This talk will discuss how culture connects to organizational performance, vocabulary for how to describe culture, research about the effects of culture, an d tactics you can use to change your culture for the better.

Speaker Information:

Jeff Gallimore, Excella Consulting / Partner .
Jeff is a Partner and Co-founder at Excella Consulting, a 240-ish-person IT consulting firm based in Arlington, VA. Jeff started his career as a developer and DBA then turned to the dark side by going into management. Now he lives vicariously through other engineers and reminisces about the good ol' days when he spent most of his time in a code editor and the command line rather than Outlook and Excel. Jeff currently leads Excella's Services organization building the firm's capabilities and thought leadership in the work they do. Regardless of the role, Jeff keeps a passion for technology and how it can be used to support the business and achieve results.

Our next meeting will be scheduled for sometime this summer