Latest from Helen
You Cannot Fake Flow: What Organizations Get Wrong About Value Delivery
Most organizations that have invested heavily in Agile and DevOps share a puzzling experience. Deployment frequency is up. Teams are busy. Dashboards are green. And yet value still queues. Strategy still takes months to reach the customer. Feedback still arrives too late to change anything important. Flow coach Marnus Marx has a name for this […]
Jun 19, 2026 · 3 minAll articles by Helen Beal
Showing 1–10From Pilots to Performance: Why Enterprise Flow is the New Competitive Advantage
Flow: Not a buzzword, but a discipline. Those that master it will be the ones that turn transformation ambition into transformation results.
The Flow Illusion: Why Transformation Feels Like Theatre
You’ve invested in the tools. Your teams have dashboards that track cycle time, throughput, and work in progress. You’ve likely even built a sophisticated, probabilistic roadmap. Yet, despite the data, it feels like theatre. The moment the workshop ends, that roadmap becomes a static slide deck, and teams remain paralyzed, waiting for you to update […]
Flowtopia Live 2026: Engineering the Frictionfree Enterprise
If your goals are accelerating flow and maximizing value in your organization, consider grabbing yourself a ticket to this year’s Flowtopia Live on Wednesday, June 24th. Flowtopia is a community of value stream practitioners, and this is our annual online jamboree where we gather to share, learn, and celebrate all things flow-related. Over 12 hours, […]
Assessment of DevOps Capabilities: 5 Dimensions Explained
In order for organizations and teams to move toward DevOps maturity, they need to understand their DevOps capabilities. An Assessment of DevOps Capabilities determines a baseline DevOps state, measures and accelerates continuous improvement. When we designed our Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC), the ambassador cohort brought a ton of ideas to the table around the […]
Why is Site Reliability Engineering Important?
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is one of the fastest-growing enterprise roles and set of operational practices for managing services at scale. During the Site Reliability Engineering SKILup Day June 18, I asked a group of the DevOps Institute Ambassadors why SRE was important to them. Below you will find some insightful responses, tips and calls […]
DevOps Days London: The Human Factor
Day 2 of DevOpsDays London 2016 kicked off with a presentation from the legendary Gene Kim. The theme that dominated today’s proceedings was the “human factor,” (fitting, as we finished Day 1 with #humanops) nicely started by Gene’s quote from Nathan Shimek: “We need DevOps to make our work humane.” The second day delved beyond […]
DevOpsDays London 2016: Making Happy
We haven’t had a DevOpsDays event in London since 2013. The audience size was about the same at this year’s event, held April 19-20, as I remember from last time, but about 85 percent of the audience were attending a DevOpsDays event for the first time. It was great to see so many new faces, […]
6 Common Causes of Conflict DevOps Sets Out to Solve
It’s a very exciting time to work in Information Technology – as John Willis* put it: “DevOps finally proves how IT can be a strategic advantage that allows a business to beat the pants off the competition. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.” I work with organizations that are palpably excited that the […]
10 Top Tips for DevOps Cultural Change
DevOps is commonly recognised to be primarily about creating a culture of effective and seamless collaboration but this is often the hardest piece to enact when it involves changing an existing culture (as opposed to creating a culture from scratch in a startup type environment and having the luxury of hiring individuals with certain mindsets […]