I recently gained some new responsibilities at work. In addition to leading the core infrastructure teams, I now also lead application development. Having Development and Operations under a single leader is trending right now, and I’m very excited for the opportunity to be on-point for our DevOps transformation at CHS.

As I’ve discussed previously in this blog, I came up through the technical ranks on the infrastructure side before going into leadership. To date, I’ve spent my entire career indirectly supporting development. As a Sr. Engineer, I had a role in infrastructure that directly faced-up to application development. I enjoyed being the one to run the code that our development teams pumped out. There were always challenges dealing with scalability, performance, availability, security, and capacity. Usually, it took strong collaboration with smart developers to make everything run optimally. Also, I often found that it was application development that often challenged infrastructure & operations to modernize and evolve as new application technologies and methodologies became mainstream.

I am a technologist by nature and training. I love keeping up on the latest tech trends, curating them, and bringing the best to bear inside my company. However, as technical as I think I am, I’ve never written a line of source code in my career. The closest thing I’ve done is administrative automation scripting (batch, VBScript, and PowerShell), but I don’t think that really counts.

While I’m new at leading application development, I’m not new at leading new things. I’ve done this before, a lot of times. My leadership journey has been all about adding new functional disciplines to my leadership span of control. When I first started managing, I lead a server team, which was my specialty. Then I added to that networking, which was totally new to me at the time. I studied hard, got hands-on, and learned the discipline. Then I added to that iSeries, which is a very different beast. I never put my hands on the green screen console, but I learned the terminology, the architecture, the vendor ecosystem, and the technology roadmaps, so I could lead it effectively.

Given that, I’m currently pondering what it is that I should do to develop myself to be the best application development leader I can be. To clarify, they don’t need me to run the ship. I’m blessed with extremely competent Managers, Team Leads, and Sr. Developers that all know exactly what they are doing. What I need to do is support the team, drive us forward on our DevOps and Agile transformation, and continuously improve our technical and delivery capability.

So here’s my question for my readership: What should an operations guy like me do to develop myself to lead and support my development teams? Great books? Interesting YouTube videos? Challenging seminars, workshops, or conferences? I’m open to anything. I’ll even consider organizing my managerial workload on a Kanban board, if it will help.

This is an exciting turn for my career. I’ve really wanted to increase my span of control, and I’m happy that CHS has the confidence to give me the opportunity. It also certainly gives me plenty of new material to write about on this blog. I’ll be chronicling my journey as usual, so stay tuned!