Publications & Research

Driving Innovation: How Leaders Create a Learning Culture
Journal paper · Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal, Vol. 1 No. 2 · IT Revolution · Fall 2024 · lead author, with Harry Koehnemann, Adam Furtado, Bryan Woodruff & Tamara Skye · Read

Deloitte pegs high-performing learning organizations as 92% more likely to innovate and 46% more likely to reach market first — yet leaders keep dismissing learning culture as a nice-to-have. The paper works the problem at three levels: the leader as coach, the team as scenius (Brian Eno's collective genius), and learning objectives wired into enterprise OKRs. Microsoft's shift from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls supplies the model; Google's slide from eighth to twenty-sixth on Fortune's best-workplaces list is the warning.

Building a Learning Culture in Nine Steps
Article · IT Revolution · October 5, 2023 · lead author, with Harry Koehnemann, Jeffrey Fredrick, Steve Mayner & Thomas Limoncelli · Read

Submarine captain David Marquet welcomed inspectors aboard and discussed known problems openly — a shift that helped take his ship from worst in the fleet to a streak of superior inspection ratings. That is one of nine patterns in this excerpt from the Fall 2023 leader's guide, alongside WD-40's "learning moments" and the rule that a painful process is one to run more often. Each pattern stands alone; leaders can apply one or a few as needed.

How to Thrive (or Fail) in Building a Learning Culture: A Leader's Guide
Journal paper · The DevOps Enterprise Journal · IT Revolution · Fall 2023 · lead author, with Harry Koehnemann, Jeffrey Fredrick, Steve Mayner & Thomas Limoncelli · Read

An IT executive berates the volunteers who rescued his bank's system conversion; a Google SRE chief answers a brittle release process by doubling its frequency; an executive team lands at $0 against a $2 million key result and asks why the target seemed reasonable rather than who to blame. Nine independent patterns for leaders building a learning culture, each with its principle, a transgression story, an adherence story, and actions to take tomorrow.

Business Transformation and the Learning Culture: The Learning Moment*
Forbes Technology Council · Forbes* · August 29, 2023 · Read

Many organizations answer mistakes with documentation and disciplinary action — a punitive reflex sociologist Ron Westrum observed, one that breeds blame and scapegoating instead of learning. Shupack opens this series on learning culture with the alternative: the learning review, which takes the DevOps blameless post-mortem attributed to former Etsy CTO John Allspaw beyond IT; a lightweight root-cause analysis that catalogs incidents and broadcasts what they taught; and leaders who admit their own mistakes first, because learning starts at the top.

Becoming a Flow-Based Organization: Business Agility in Corporate Functions
Joint study · Capgemini Invent × Project & Team · 2023 · credited author, with Markus Vogg, Carolin Luber, Lukas Kloepfer, Filipe Saldanha, Kaya Heinrichs & Henrik Baumann of Capgemini Invent, and Emily Sperring of Project & Team · Read

An aerospace and defense company with more than 150,000 employees cut estimated subsidiary-integration time from six months per company to six months for its entire backlog of roughly thirty. This Capgemini Invent–P&T joint study, grounded in a survey of 316 German and US respondents, maps a three-stage maturity curve for bringing HR, finance, and payroll into the flow of product development; and argues corporate functions belong at the start of a transformation, not the end.

Overcoming Barriers to Industrial DevOps: Working with the Hardware-Engineering Community
Journal paper · The DevOps Enterprise Journal · IT Revolution · Fall 2022 · co-author, with Suzette Johnson, Robin Yeman, Harry Koehnemann, Hasan Yasar, Ben Grinnell, Deborah Brey, Steve Farley & Josh Corman · Read

The claim is blunt: cyber-physical systems will soon be hard, maybe impossible, to deliver "at the speed of relevance" without Industrial DevOps. The paper opens as a letter to the hardware-engineering community, then works through nine objections engineers raise — component costs, supplier lead times, test equipment, fixed schedules — countering them with digital twins, set-based design, and additive manufacturing. Relativity Space already 3D-prints entire rockets in one-tenth the production time.

What Agile Thinking In Government Means For Business
Forbes Technology Council · Forbes · August 31, 2022 · Read

The 2022 Federal Workforce Priorities Report names building an agile workforce a primary governmentwide priority, and the Technology Modernization Fund's executive director told House Oversight that milestone-tied, incremental investment is why its projects land on time or early. Shupack's point for private industry, especially firms holding federal contracts: when an organization the size of the federal government treats agile as the path forward, that should "ring some bells."

How Agile Thinking Has Helped Federal Programs Excel
Forbes Technology Council · Forbes · June 28, 2022 · Read

When 18 of 24 federal agencies failed to improve their FITARA scores, GSA earned the only A-plus. Shupack traces how a nearly $10 million Technology Modernization Fund investment and agile methods let the agency modernize 88 IT applications at once — no cost overruns, a projected on-budget finish, and playbooks GSA has handed to other agencies facing the same problem.

Value Stream Management and Organizing around Value
Journal paper · The DevOps Enterprise Journal, Vol. 4 No. 1 · IT Revolution · Spring 2022 · co-author, with Saahil Panikar & Cindy Van Epps · Read

One financial group reorganized into 127 Agile Release Trains, one per system — then found the average initiative required dependency coordination across 70 to 80 of them, leaving it less efficient than before. That is one of four failure modes the authors dissect in organizing around value, each paired with a fix proven in the field: operational value streamlets, digital threads tied to business processes, and measuring value in working solutions instead of busyness.

From Simplify To Amplify: Creating A Continuous Learning Culture
Forbes Technology Council · Forbes · April 26, 2022 · Read

Lean taught companies to optimize output and strip out waste. Shupack's reframe: today the game is optimizing for rapid learning, and the space learning requires can't be booked as waste. Hackathons are a fine start but can harden into a grind of "come in and be innovative" — the real test is whether an organization measures learning and feeds it back in, or just talks about it.

Understanding the Pharma Manufacturer's Dilemma: How Laboratory Innovations Are Solving the "Build versus Buy" Problem
Trade feature · Contract Pharma · November 9, 2021 · Read

A new cleanroom-for-hire filled to capacity before opening day: Moderna took 75% of it. Shupack uses that to reframe operational agility in pharma's build-versus-buy dilemma, sharpened by a coming surge in cell and gene therapy approvals and outsourcing waitlists of 18 months or longer. Two middle paths anchor the piece: leased cleanrooms that pull speed-to-clinic down to one to three months, and "cloud labs" where researchers mail in samples and rent access to 190 instrument categories by subscription.

Building Industrial DevOps Stickiness: Applying Insights
Journal paper · The DevOps Enterprise Journal, Vol. 3 No. 2 · IT Revolution · Fall 2021 · co-author, with Suzette Johnson, Robin Yeman, Harry Koehnemann, Matt Aizcorbe, Adrian Cockcroft, Michael McKay & Hasan Yasar · Read

When an automotive CEO and an engineering lead each sketch what Industrial DevOps means, the drawings share nothing but the vehicle. That misalignment, not tooling, is why the fictional automaker's early wins haven't spread beyond engineering. The fourth Industrial DevOps research paper works the fix through shared mental models, a Wardley Mapping workshop, and Westrum's organizational typology, because "without ubiquitous adoption, transformations don't stick."

Why Digital Transformation Is a Process, Not a Destination
Commentary · FCW / Nextgov · August 9, 2021 · Read

Federal agencies that feel they have no time for digital transformation are exactly the ones with the most to gain. A paradox common enough that agencies and vendors formed an informal working group to crack it. After data center optimization dragged down 2020 FITARA grades, with several agencies falling a grade or more, Shupack hands IT managers the message they must carry up the chain: run transformation as a cycle: strategy, system readiness, change leadership — then start again.

Applied Industrial DevOps 2.0: A Hero's Journey
Journal paper · The DevOps Enterprise Journal, Vol. 2 No. 1 · IT Revolution · Fall 2020 · co-author, with Joy Crook, Suzette Johnson, Harry Koehnemann, Steven J. Spear, Hasan Yasar, Robin Yeman, Jeff Boleng, Eileen Wrubel & Mik Kersten · Read

Third in the Industrial DevOps series, this one runs the playbook through a fictional automotive program — and lets the first increment stumble. Value streams, hardware roadmaps, and CI pipelines all get built; then a two-month QA certification backlog, a waterfall supplier, and incentives rewarding siloed teams erode the gains. The authors' fix: treat culture as architecture, with capacity reserved every iteration for technical debt reduction and innovation.

Bold Moves You Can Make: Actions for Positive Transformation
Journal paper · The DevOps Enterprise Journal, Vol. 2 No. 1 · IT Revolution · Fall 2020 · co-author, with Amy Walters, Dominica DeGrandis, Jon Moore, Michael Nygard, Ross Clanton, Ben Grinnell & Paula Thrasher · Read

When COVID hit, one Fortune 100 company — over two hundred thousand employees — paused every single project, and the eight-week freeze let teams overhaul remote work and retire the "frustration-inducing" VPN. That is the kind of move the authors mean by bold. Their survey of twenty-one enterprise leaders found the pandemic mostly accelerating digital transformation; the four prescribed moves: radical prioritization of work, increased investment in transformation, demonstrating the DevOps way, and modernizing the technical stack.

Selected published work.
Client deliverables and internal reports are not listed.