Culture & Collaboration Culture amplifies or negates every technical investment. Sustainable DevOps depends on psychological safety, shared ownership, and continuous learning.
Core Cultural Tenets Tenet Description Signal Psychological Safety People can surface risk & mistakes Honest retros Shared Ownership Teams own build → run lifecycle On-call rotates include devs Transparency Work & system state visible Dashboards, WIP limits Experimentation Safe-to-try mindset Small reversible changes Continuous Learning Institutional memory improves Documented postmortems
Communication Patterns Prefer async documentation + succinct synchronous alignment Use runbooks & decision records (ADR) to reduce tribal knowledge Adopt incident channels with clear roles (commander, scribe, SMEs) Blameless Postmortems Element Purpose Timeline Establish factual sequence Impact Quantify user/business effect Contributing Factors Systemic causes (avoid single blame) Remediations Actionable, owned follow-ups Learning Patterns to propagate
Operating Models Model Trade-Off Embedded SRE Deep context, scaling headcount Central Platform Team Reuse & standards, risk of gatekeeping Guild/Community of Practice Cross-pollination, needs facilitation
Anti-Patterns Hero culture (reward firefighting over prevention) Hidden work & invisible toil Blame-focused incident reviews Overloaded gatekeeper teams Practical Starting Moves Introduce lightweight incident template Track toil hours vs. project work Run quarterly culture health retro Publish internal glossary of key terms Next: (Return to roadmap index) Foundations Overview