DevOps: Politics, People and Process with Paula Thrasher

I first met Paula Thrasher at DevOps Summit 2016 in San Francisco. Her message about people at the core of software supply chain processes resonated with me enough that I invited her to participate on a panel at RSA Conference 2016 in San Francisco on February 29. In the run up to the conference, I recorded this call with Paula about what it takes to facilitate a large scale DevOps project for the US Government. Her main concentration is in change management and how to deal with the intricacy of various personalities when working with developers, the security team and operations. About Paula Thrasher Paula is an Application Delivery Lead at CSRA, formed from the merger of CSC's government services unit and SRA International. CSRA is a the leading provider in next-generation IT and professional services to the US Government. Paula leads digital transformations for customers across the federal government. She has 20 years experience in information technology and works in the federal market leading agencies and teams towards Agile and DevOps. Paula’s first Agile project was in 2001, since then she has led over 15 programs and projects as an Agile developer, technical lead, Scrum master, or Agile coach. Her teams have helped three separate federal agencies migrate applications to Amazon AWS GovCloud, and done some other amazing DevOps ninja work along the way. Paula a Carnegie Mellon University alumna with a B.S. in Statistics, is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and a Project Management Professional (PMP), but prefers learning new things through experience and working with smart people.