ChefConf 2018 CFP: People, Process, and Teams

ChefConf is the largest community gathering and educational event for teams on the journey to becoming fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations. In other words, you and your team!

ChefConf 2018 will take place May 22-25 in Chicago, Illinois and we want you to present! The ChefConf call for presenters (CFP) is now open.

One of the tracks you might consider proposing a session for is the People, Process, and Teams track.

People, Process, and Teams

DevOps is a cultural and professional movement. Getting an organization to a place where everything is continuously automated requires changes to the tooling and the culture. The tool choices we make reinforce and amplify the culture we are building which, in turn, reinforces and amplifies the tools we are using. Trying to separate tooling from people is a fool’s errand. People that are engaged in their work and collaborating have a better chance of creating great products which are produced by great companies. People always come first.

The People, Process, and Teams track is where the community can share stories of cultural, process, and team transformations. Stories at the scale of an individual journey of an entire organizational transformation are appropriate!

Find some questions and suggestions to help spark your talk proposal below!

People

Success begins with the people participating in our systems. People who are responsible for deciding what to build, people who are responsible for building those things, people responsible for operating and securing those things, and, yes, even those people who are using the things we are building and operating.

  • How has your definition of the “customer” changed over time?
  • What are you doing to help people learn and practice new skills?
  • What changes have you made to the way you recruit and retain people on your team?
  • What programs have you put in place to improve employee happiness and engagement?

Processes

Agile, Lean, DevOps, Scrum, Kanban, Post Mortems, Learning Reviews, the list goes on and on. Our work is filled with so many different processes and practices with the goal of improving our customers’ experience, improving our ability to deliver, tightening feedback loops, and more. What processes have you and your team adopted to improve the ways you work?

  • Lean includes a number of practices. Which are you adopting that are working? Failing?
  • Have you adopted Agile practices? What role does agile play outside of your development teams?
  • Creating a Learning Organization requires buy-in across and throughout every level of the organization. What success and roadblocks have you encountered?

Teams

DevOps is sometimes described as people working together towards a common goal. We certainly espouse the virtues of collaboration and empathy. Reaching alignment in one team can lead to spreading that alignment across many different teams. DevOps and Continuous Automation are not the job of a single team but the entire organization working together.

  • What practices have you implemented to increase and improve collaboration across teams within your organization?
  • How is your team working together with “the business” to understand your customers and deliver delight to them?
  • Many of us got our start in infrastructure automation. What changes have you made to bring other technology teams into the fold? Teams like development, security, and quality assurance?
  • Do your team practice regular rotations of people from one team to the next? What practices are you using to increase cross-team learning?

Other Tracks

The ChefConf CFP is open for the following tracks:

Share Your Story

Your story and experiences are worth sharing with the community. Help others learn and further your own knowledge through sharing. The ChefConf CFP is open now. Use some of the questions posed here to help form a talk proposal for the people, process, and teams track.

Submit your talk proposal now!  The deadline is Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 11:59 PM Pacific time.

Nathen Harvey

As the VP of Community Development at Chef, Nathen helps the community whip up an awesome ecosystem built around the Chef framework. Nathen also spends much of his time helping people learn about the practices, processes, and technologies that support DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Web-scale IT. Prior to joining Chef, Nathen spent a number of years managing operations and infrastructure for a number of web applications. Nathen is a co-host of the Food Fight Show, a podcast about Chef and DevOps.