Gaining trust and changing culture

Any new effort that goes against the grain of the current culture will experience a bumpy start. It’s normal. But it won’t take long for the culture to start changing once the new approach proves its worth.

I remember my first lift-and-shift project. It was a long uphill climb, but then things changed, almost overnight.

We initially transplanted our manual data center processes into the cloud. But we saw no real benefit from the cloud at that point because each release of the software was still slow and painful. So we set out to automate the deployment of the entire platform. We encountered resistance from the start. But we applied our agile, incremental development methodology and started to move forward. First, we did a quick proof of concept, and then we addressed incremental pain points as we progressed toward the full solution. Along the way, we picked up support.

After a long six months, we had all the support we...