Challenging the Status Quo in DevOps through Innovation

About Tenable

Tenable®, Inc. is a Cyber Exposure company. Over 30,000 organizations around the globe rely on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk. As the creator of Nessus®, Tenable extended its expertise in vulnerabilities to deliver the world’s first platform to see and secure any digital asset on any computing platform. Tenable customers include more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500, more than 30 percent of the Global 2000, and large government agencies.

Driving Leadership Principles

Dheeraj’s leadership style is based on challenging the status quo. He strives to be a disruptive leader who faces any challenge head-on, whether it be transforming ops into DevOps or automating different systems. 

“Change is the only constant in the world. It’s okay to try and fail, but it’s not okay to not try.”

Dheeraj Khanna

Dheeraj explains that software engineering has only evolved through experimentation. Today’s successful companies embraced that principle and weren’t afraid to fail. 

Principles of a Great DevOps Leader

A great DevOps leader must be able to understand business drivers and how technology can be used to enable those drivers. Maybe it’s product differentiation or customer service differentiation. No matter the driver, the leader must constantly be trying to innovate and improve these processes.

A great DevOps leader must also form strong partnerships with other internal company leaders. Change can be difficult, but it’s easier and more effective to have the buy-in of other leaders in the organization.

It's the job of the leader to be skeptically curious of new projects and ideas. This way, the best solution is chosen.

A DevOps Leader's Impact

DevOps leaders need to be able to clearly communicate the health of services to anyone in the company. Dashboards shouldn’t be overly complex. In fact, the CEO should be able to look at a dashboard and instantaneously know the health of the business. DevOps leaders impact decisions by providing crystal clear data. 

Where Most Leaders Go Wrong

Leaders often struggle to make significant changes. Maybe they wait too long and the problem begins compounding on top of itself, or maybe the correct internal buy-in wasn’t received. Either way, if leaders can’t make change they aren’t doing their job. 

Is Leadership an Art or Science?

Leadership is an art. It takes emotional intelligence to identify your employees’ motivation to get everyone to effectively work together. Maybe someone on the team is afraid of failing, or maybe they’re overworked. In either scenario, they won’t be able to complete a new project. 

Selling DevOps Ideas Internally

This is also an art. Dheeraj focuses most of his time on the message behind the idea. The message must be tied to business objectives and communicated to the right people. After crafting the message, Dheeraj evangelizes the idea around the company to win over key stakeholders. 

From Jenkins to Harness

Dheeraj helped his company switch from Jenkins to Harness to automate and improve software delivery. Managing configuration files manually wasn’t scalable and was too prone to human error. Harness helps standardize all of Tenable’s environments.