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DevOps: Tools or Mindset?

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Update December 2017: TMNS is now Devoteam

On May 10th 2016, TMNS hosted a meeting in our The Hague office for the Agile Holland Meetup, a group of enthusiastic professionals that discuss agile related topics on a regular basis. Hosting this event was a great opportunity for TMNS, as we are going at full speed within the field of DevOps. The topic of this evening was DevOps: Tools or Mindset?

The evening started with a great meal where all 30 attendees were able to network with each other. The Italian buffet was received very well. Melis Schaap, Sales Director at TMNS, then introduced TMNS to our attendees and shared the agenda for the evening.

The first speaker, Gert-Jan van Halem (senior consultant at TMNS), introduced everyone to the duck game (should be well known if you have  followed the TMNS scrum training), which sparked a very lively discussion. In 2 minutes, you have to pass as many ducks around in your team as possible, and each team member must have touched each duck. One of the teams hit their estimated score before the time limit, but according to the rules exceeding your estimate would hurt your score. The discussion that followed was about what you need to do with the remaining sprint time if you have reached your sprint goal. During the general discussion it became clear that people had different opinions on what should be done if this is the case.

The first part was followed by a presentation from Sander Ettema (Rabobank). Sander Ettema discussed the journey of switching to Devops at Rabobank. This journey is necessary because Rabobank aims to increase its capital adequacy ratio and to deliver better time to market (a mortgage within a week). He mentioned a lot of tooling necessary to accomplish this, but it’s not only about the tooling: the mindset is also an important part of the challenge at Rabobank.

After Sander’s presentation, Gert-Jan had one more interactive challenge for the attendees: some of the more challenging topics from Sander’s story where being discussed during a brainstorm in smaller groups, thus supporting everyone who faces similar problems in their own organization.

The evening finished with having a drink together, so everyone could discuss the topics and conclusions that came by. We felt it was a very successful night and the feeling was reciprocal, as we already received quite some positive feedback from our attendees.

Eager to participate in a future meetup?