Jayne Groll is co-founder and CEO of the DevOps Institute (DOI). Her IT management career spans over 25 years of senior IT management roles across a wide range of industries. Her expertise spans multiple domains including DevOps, Agile, ITIL and Leadership.
Jayne is a recognized and respected IT thought leader and influencer. In addition to authoring the Agile Service Management Guide, Jayne has co-authored several IT position papers including “Modernizing IT Operations in the Age of DevOps” that was published in 2018 by IT Revolution.
Jayne is very active in the global DevOps, ITSM and Agile communities and is a frequent presenter at local, national and virtual events.
As a co-founder of DOI, what were some of your motivations behind creating the organisation?
I had the privilege of seeing DevOps begin its rise in 2012 at an early DevOps Days. As DevOps started to cross into the enterprise community, we knew there would be a need for curation of trending practices, education and certification as well as communities of practice.
DevOps Institute is dedicated to advancing the human elements of DevOps success – can you explain more about the SKIL framework?
While there is a heavy emphasis on automation, It is the human element that is going to make DevOps successful for most enterprises. Humans innovate, disrupt and implement automation. Humans have a holistic need to keep evolving professionally – Skills represent career growth in the form of certifications, job boards and learning paths. Knowledge represents insight from research, case studies, blogs, webinars, etc. Ideas are sparked by exchanging ideas with others through forums, events and other opportunities to engage. And Learning should be continuous in small increments such as our new Continuous Learning Minutes series.
For organisations looking to implement DevOps practices, what do you think the key challenges are?
I think the key challenge is finding the balance between people, process and automation including interoperability at all levels – people need to collaborate and communicate better, processes need to integrate between Agile, ITIL, DevOps, etc. And Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment helps to create automated pipelines for faster and more frequent delivery.
You’ve recently attended the DevOps World conference in San Francisco, were there any workshops that stood out to you?
DevOps Institute has partnered with DevOps World/Jenkins World for several years by bringing in partners and trainers to deliver certification courses. For the third year, we offered DevOps Leader – a certification course about transformational leadership for DevOps. This year we also offered DevSecOps Engineering, a trending topic. Both were very well attended, taught by outstanding partner instructors and got great reviews.
Getting more women involved in tech is still an issue, with approximately 5% of DevOps Engineers being female. Have you ever faced any challenges as a woman in tech?
Of course! But I have also worked on diverse teams that generally treated me with inclusiveness and respect. Thankfully, the issue of diversity and inclusiveness is gaining more attention so that any unconscious (or conscious) bias is being overcome on the individual and organizational level.
How can the tech industry address the gender gap that exists, especially in DevOps?
Frankly, we need more Women in Tech panels and events sharing the cool parts of being an engineer in an amazing and disruptive time so that young girls and women can see role models of “Technologists Who Happen to Be Women” instead of calling us out as a different species of “Women in Tech”.
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