Chaos, panic, disaster! I think my work here is done.

This is what what was written on the t-shirt my team gave me as I prepared to present my final business update to the team at our quarterly team meeting.

“Chaos, panic, disaster! I think my work here is done.”

These have been poignant moments as I finish up in my current role as Director of Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs in EMEA this week. It was great to leave on a high with our best ever quarter, the business is on a roll!

I can honestly say that being part of this team for the last few years has been the most fulfilling experience of my career so far. It was humbling and challenging to work with such a talented group to build, from scratch, an entirely new consulting offering for Red Hat.

Labs Residency

As a team we have built the best consulting product I have ever seen, the Labs Residency. It helps teams “do” DevOps with Red Hat technologies and results in “residents” regularly saying this was the best work experience of their careers!
We have seen teams completely transformed in just a few weeks by going through a residency and then taking that flame back into their own organisations to spread the change.

DevOps Culture and Practice Enablement

We didn’t stop there! We also built what I believe is the best DevOps Enablement in the world. Three facilitators (an Engagement Lead, a Techie and a UX expert) with kit bags brimming full of real world experience and stories take a class through an unforgettable experience!

This experience exposes the participants to the Practices in the Open Practice Library, which Introduces continuous Discovery and continuous Delivery on a foundation of Cultural and Technical practices in a way that technical and non-technical folks can participate together!

We are currently tracking a high 90s NPS for this course worldwide! This is just unheard of. Participants regularly say this was the best course they have ever attended.

I believe it is unbelievably good value too. Find out more about the DO500: DevOps Culture and Practice Enablement we built and more importantly enrol today for upcoming runs (seats are still available in September)

It is all Open Source!

We have been true to the “Open” that is in our title, all of the practices we use and the whole training course are fully open source!

I believe the team I leave behind are going to go on and do even greater things and I can’t wait to see where the emerging offerings they are working and experimenting with around early product discovery, open leadership and transformation at scale end up!

Thank You

To the many amazing customers that trusted us over the last few years, THANK YOU! It has been an amazing pleasure to be part of your journey! We could not have done this without your trust and feedback. Our teams have built such a great connection between them and your stories are amazing, let’s get more of them out there so others can learn from what we learnt.

To my Labs friends in Europe and around the world, thank you for the most profoundly moving experience of my career so far. We have built something special, a team! A team that has a shared purpose with meaning AND is executing in the same direction! Once a pirate, always a pirate! 🦜 🏴‍☠️ ☠️

To my Red Hat colleagues, these are bittersweet moments for me. Red Hat is a special place with a unique culture but the thing that sticks most with me is the amazing friendships and connections I have made with you all. In a company where our interactions should have been purely “professional” I believe our shared purpose (to use open to unlock the world’s potential) has allowed us to form far deeper bonds between us.

I am now signing off from one great adventure and on Monday I will be back into the arena again to start the next one, watch this space.