15 years of DevOpsDays

Culture is still a challenge
2024-09-05 , Main Room

Culture is hard. People are messy. Organizational culture may be in direct opposition to the values and practices of a local community or country. Research and recommendations are everywhere, and if the culture of your organization isn't what you need it to be, it might not be completely your fault.


When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. For technical teams, their control over their environment is often limited to the technical tools they choose to use to implement their projects. Unfortunately, tooling alone doesn’t create better customer experiences, better end products, and happier employees; culture plays a major role.
Organizational culture is set from the top. The attitudes, values, and behaviors of an organization’s leadership forms the core of the organization’s culture. While some folks may feel disenchanted with the commodification of ideas like DevOps, there is still work to be done, helping organizations with their cultural challenges.
How can tech teams influence culture? How can individuals support and grow a more positive culture? Technology is not alone in the struggle for better organizational structures and relationships, and we’ll talk about some of the methods and research.

Mandi Walls is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty. For PagerDuty, she helps organizations along their IT Modernization journey. Prior to PagerDuty, she worked at Chef Software and AOL. She is an international speaker on DevOps topics and the author of the whitepaper “Building A DevOps Culture”, published by O’Reilly.