I don't mean to dismiss or insult the support/sysadmin career path or experience, especially since I started out on that track! I've been lucky in that most of my career I've worked closely with developers, R&D, and academia. That has given me exposure to project work concepts such as requirements, acceptance criteria, sprints, etc.
My progression from sysadmin to DevOps took place over more than a decade; how do I help people who haven't had that gradual change embrace the more software development style mindset? One team I am working with is very focused on support tickets and interrupts, and I'd like to help that team switch to a more project-based mindset.
How do I help people whose background is in interrupt-driven work change to working in sprints with requirements, features, etc?
Or do you disagree with my fundamental assumption that people whose experience has been in support have a harder time moving to a project-based workflow?
They really need air cover from management and buy in from stakeholders. Most sysadmins I know would love to be proactive, but they are not given the bandwidth or time to do planned work. Things like deployment, maintenance and improvement of the platform, etc are not properly baked into product planning and always tackled at the last minute.