Culture and Behaviors are the Cornerstones to Success

In Chapter 2, Understanding Your Current Pain Points, we learned that asking people to be open and honest is not that easy, unless you take the time to set the environment up to allow for it. The environment had to be such that a culture of honest disclosure could take place. On top of this, you had to ensure that every participant agreed to behave according to the flexible rules and processes set out.

We will now take this experience and expand upon it to ensure the environment, culture, and behaviors throughout the organization are set up to allow for—what can be—potentially massive change. The sorts of things we'll be covering throughout this chapter are the following:

• Why culture is so important
• How your working environment can impact your culture
• How culture and behaviors affect your progress and success
• Encouraging innovation at a grass-roots level
• Fostering a sense of accountability across all areas of your organization
• Removing blame from the working environment
• Embracing and learning from failure
• Building trust
• Rewarding success in the right way
• Instilling a sense that change is good
• How good PR can help

Throughout this chapter, we'll also be looking at what this means to the three personas you were previously introduced to:

In addition, we'll include a new persona who runs the show from an IT perspective:

• Victoria the veep 

Let's start by clarifying why culture is so important to the successful adoption of CD and DevOps.