Configuration Management Working Group May 2017 Meeting

At the May 2017 CMWG meeting: Jeff Gallimore leads the discussion of Decoding Culture: Beyond the Fluff and Back to Busines	At the May 2017 CMWG meeting: Dinner was catered by Cholito Chicken, with wonderful rotisserie chickens as well as all of our Peruvian plates.
At the May 2017 CMWG meeting: Participating in the give and take, clockwise, Hubert Chan, Jeff Gallimore, Quoc Chung and Nancy Testerman

• 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, and tactics you can use to change your culture for the better.
• Jeff has provided copies of the
  • Presentation (pptx) (pdf)
  • Taking Points (docx) (pdf)
  • The culture survey question responses (xlsx) (pdf)

• 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.