Banks are the perfect storm of DevOps anti-patterns where Technical, Organizational and Cultural barriers are all stacked against you.

We faced challenges with compliance, tech sprawl, obsolete technologies, and bloated processes. The delivery chain is often split amongst 3-4 organizations. HR, Finance and PMO don’t have the background or process to support DevOps transformations adequately. Culturally, there is fear of change, group overlap and protectionism.

Cultural sprawl is huge. You don’t have to unlock and influence just one culture; you will encounter a half dozen. As an example, the top 4 banks (Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Citi, & Bank of America) were 35 separate companies in 1990.

It sounds hopeless, right?

This talk discusses how to grow a coalition, anchor behavior, and defend your efforts from those threatened by them. The techniques help incubate your transformation until there is enough critical mass to make it tough to derail.

Through a long, painful journey, we discovered techniques you can use to weather your storms. These techniques evolved over 10 years in transformations which crossed 3 banks and 4 distinct large-scale transformations. Each transformation was unique, but the principles were universal.

This talk focuses on four ideas that can help you successfully scale DevOps: Alliances, Data, Startup Mentality and the Leadership needed to tie them together.

1) In Alliances, we’ll discuss how to identify, create and leverage alliances. We’ll show how this helps bypass resistance, plot your strategy and keep your assembly line of on-boards moving.

2) In Data, we’ll show how to use data to prove success, communicate weekly, and keep your execs asking for more.

3) Startup Mentality keeps your team focused and passionate. I told my teams: “Pretend you are a small company inside a big one. Every day measure our contribution and expect to fold if you don’t deliver.” Acting like a startup means being hungry every day, delivering in increments, focusing on just a couple efforts at a time (80/20), and pivoted rapidly. Deliver small, consistent wins to build a track record and credibility and trust. Focus on customers and their experience.

4) We’ll talk about the importance of Leadership to tie these all together and how it is necessary to transcend the cultural challenges in large organizations. Leaders must be willing to go against the grain every day while providing vision, inspiration and protection.

We struggled, slipped and hit brick walls, but one thing kept us going. Every member of our team believed that what we were doing was the most important thing in the world to our companies. This gave us the courage to keep pushing. We regrouped, came up with new plans, and got back in the game. Every day there were naysayers, politics and occasional sabotage.

Was it worth it? Yes, every minute of it. We ultimately automated over 800 applications. It can be done.

Chris Nowak, Chief Transformation Officer, Kingsmen Software