Biography

Kaimar is a Partner at Mindbridge, a consultancy company operating out of Tallinn and London. He used to work as the Head of Product Strategy and Development at AXELOS, where he was responsible for leading the work on ITIL and PRINCE2, bringing in Lean, Agile, and DevOps principles and practices. He is the lead author of the official “ITIL Practitioner” guidance published in 2016, author of “ITIL and DevOps: Getting Started”, and co-author of “Using Kanban in IT Operations”.

Before joining AXELOS, Kaimar was working with Skype, focusing on the modernization of ITSM and TechOps practices. He has a background in Product and Service Management, Project and Program Management, IT Operations, and Software Development. Recently, he has been focusing on leveraging Complexity Thinking and the Cynefin framework in IT management, ITSM, and Project Management.

Talk

Cynefin and Sense-Making in the Digital World

Cynefin (meaning ‘habitat’ in Welsh) is a sense-making framework, developed by Dave Snowden, and used for improving situational awareness and helping with decision-making by managers and hands-on professionals in various industries, including IT. The framework differentiates between ordered and unordered systems and introduces five domains (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder) that make it easier to identify the best next steps in any (challenging) situation.

The session introduces the basic concepts in Cynefin and describes its applicability to IT management and DevOps. We will cover the following:
– Supporting organisational change initiatives and transformation programs
– How to recognise your context and choose suitable methods
– How to make decisions in complex environments
– How to avoid ‘one size fits all’ approaches
– How to enable and support innovation
– How to support continual improvement

Session Keywords

Workshop

Pragmatic DevOps

Without doubt, you have heard about DevOps – but what is the significance of the DevOps movement and associated practices for your organization? Roughly speaking, there are two types of organizations – those who were born in the cloud (sometimes called ‘unicorns’, the green-field organizations that are building everything from scratch using the latest available technical solutions), and those who have IT systems from ten or more years ago (sometimes called ‘horses’, the brown-field organizations that are transitioning their IT to the cloud).

Chances are that you are working for one of these ‘horses’, and chances are that your organization has many practices, tools, processes, and procedures in place which might seem completely incompatible with DevOps (or Agile, for that matter). And this, as you’ve probably discovered, is a challenge.

This workshop will help you to address that challenge. We will cover various DevOps practices in relation to ‘traditional’ organizational structures, practices, and processes. We will explore how DevOps relates to IT Service Management, and how it helps the organization on their Digital Transformation journey.