Heather Mickman, Director, Target

Ross Clanton, Senior Group Manager, Target

This talk will largely be a reflection on the DevOps journey at Target and the focus on (re)building an engineering culture at Target. In the DevOps community you hear a lot of talk about whether you should drive DevOps in to an organization tops down or bottoms up. Well, we did a hybrid of both. It definitely started at Target as a grass roots movement in a few small teams and started to gain broader grassroots momentum when we kicked off our first internal DevOps Days in February 2014. This enabled us to start engaging a community, finding out who had passion for this across our IT organization, and providing them a forum to connect, share, and learn about DevOps awesomeness. We fostered and grew this community by leveraging social media and guerilla marketing to start driving the conversation across our organization as well as demonstrating the success that teams were having. We then leveraged some of this early energy to engage more leader champions to start building the tops down support for DevOps. Now, having completed four DevOps Days conferences at Target, we will share more details on our approach, results, speakers, and topics.

We did much more than just hosting DevOps Days. We tapped in to that growing community to start testing and learning some different approaches and we have lots to share, both in terms of results we’ve achieved and how we’re focusing on changing culture and mindsets. From a technology perspective, we will discuss how we rapidly drove momentum on our automation toolchain across our IT organization. Our vision was to enable and empower all technologists to automate the things that they were accountable for. We pursued this vision in many ways, including Automation hackathons, establishing an embedding/coaching model for our deep SMEs to help teach, open labs, community based support, and even schemed some creative work models that we will share.

The end result of these various activities is driving full stack ownership that will ultimately enable the expansion of CI/CD across our Enterprise. This is the overarching theme and next step in our enterprise transformation. It is through this foundation we are building around culture, tooling, collaborative and flexible work models that will enable our acceleration in 2015. Moving forward, we are leveraging these learnings to shift to more of a full-stack product model for our technology delivery and management. We’re also transforming infrastructure from a model based on technology silos to an end to end infrastructure service model focused on enabling business agility.

These changes haven’t been easy. In fact, we’ve already had a lot of learnings on our journey. We will share some of those key challenges and lessons learned, specifically on talent, culture, and leadership.

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