TechStrong TV talks DevOps workshops

Industry leading media company, MediaOps (DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, DevOps Institute, and more) hosts a live stream every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday featuring tech news and chats with IT leaders. Last week, MediaOps co-founder Alan Shimel welcomed Al Wagner, transformation architect with HCLSoftware DevOps, to TechStrong TV.

Although Wagner is new to HCL, he is a familiar face to the HCLSoftware DevOps team. Wagner spent 19 years at IBM – a large portion of that time with the UrbanCode products, which became part of the IP partnership between IBM and HCL. Those products now form the base code of HCL Launch and HCL Accelerate, and Wagner is continuing his work to support organizations on their DevOps transformation journeys.

Part of that support comes in the form of HCLSoftware’s new DevOps Strategy Workshops, a focus of Shimel and Wagner’s TechStrong TV chat. These workshops are a completely free opportunity for development teams to get one-on-one advice from our DevOps experts, no strings attached. “It’s not about selling software or marketing software,” Wagner told Shimel. “It’s about helping, being a trusted advisor, and understanding the problem so that the suggestions and solutions we present are viable, valid, and will deliver on the results.”

With trade shows going virtual, business trips put on hold, and face-to-face networking cancelled, opportunities to connect with other software development professionals has taken a sharp decline. But these workshops offer a new way to engage with others in the industry, and are potentially even more beneficial than the kind of networking that was offered at industry events.

“I used to do a lot of these DevOps networking events, which were one-to-many kind of events where I’d stand in front of a room of 50-to-100 people, evangelizing DevOps best practices and demonstrating some products,” says Wagner. “The workshop is really a one-on-one consultant type of service. In the networking events, people may refrain from sharing some of the challenges they were facing because they don’t want to be judged by others in the room. In a workshop, you get into truly understanding what the issues are, and then you can dive in deeper to figure out what’s causing it. Those kinds of discussions only come out in that one-on-one conversation.”

So who should request a DevOps workshop? They’re useful for organizations at every stage of DevOps adoption, but it’s important to have the right group of stakeholders across teams involved instead of only an individual contributor or one team within the pipeline.

“Get the right people at the table – change advocates, decision makers, team leads – then we can plot out a prescriptive plan that aligns to what they’re trying to do with the business around DevOps,” says Wagner.

See Al Wagner’s entire TechStrong TV interview below. Ready to get started with your own DevOps workshop? Click here to request one.