Adoption of DevOps Is Gaining Momentum in CSPs

Summary Communications service providers are adopting DevOps as a means to enable and accelerate business change. We explore emerging practices from CSP CIOs who have embarked on this journey, what they have learned and what value their initiatives have contributed.

Overview

Impacts

• Communications service providers (CSPs) that have adopted agile methods have been able to improve their time to value for IT-related initiatives.
• Agile methods are a valid first step toward DevOps in CSPs, but achieving scaled adoption across the IT organization can be challenging.
• Ingrained views about technical governance, perceived risks and overall resistance to change can impede the CSP's ability to alter project methods.

Recommendations

CSP CIOs should:

• Create a holistic vision for IT development, delivery and operational capabilities, ensuring that the strategy is clearly understood in order to drive buy-in and execution.
• Establish clearly defined roles and outcome-driven objectives, but let each team have as much flexibility as possible in defining how work will get done.
• Address common people issues such as misaligned team goals, skills gaps and resistance to change.

Contents

• Analysis Why CSPs Are Adopting DevOps
• While Use Cases Differ, the Rationale Is Similar
• Impacts and Recommendations Communications service providers (CSPs) that have adopted agile methods have been able to improve their time to value for IT-related initiatives Getting started and maintaining momentum require focused effort
• Agile methods are a valid first step toward DevOps in CSPs, but achieving scaled adoption across the IT organization can be challenging
• Ingrained views about technical governance, perceived risks and overall resistance to change can impede the CSP's ability to alter project methods
• Gartner Recommended Reading

Tables

• Table 1. CSP DevOps Deployments Vary by Use Case and Maturity

Figures

• Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for CSP Adoption of DevOps

Analysis

DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile and lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology, especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.

Why CSPs Are Adopting DevOps

DevOps, because of its emphasis on agile, lean and other methodologies, is often assumed to be appropriate only for a "startuplike" software development culture. However, DevOps is not rigidly prescriptive and locked into one way of doing things. Instead, there are many elements in DevOps that apply across the spectrum of communications service provider (CSP) development and operations (see "Principles and Practices of DevOps" ).

While network-based CSPs have traditionally operated with a plan-driven approach that emphasizes safety and accuracy in the pursuit of reliability, the demands of digital business are pushing them to become radically more agile. This, coupled with the increasingly software-defined nature of network infrastructure, dictates that a move to iterative, largely outcome-focused approaches is needed.

While Use Cases Differ, the Rationale Is Similar

The DevOps deployments in CSPs that we have observed are not all the same. 1 In a few cases, they are relatively isolated within a business unit. In most cases, however, there are conscious efforts to extend and enhance agile deployments within the IT organization. Examples include:

• Internal IT organization (Orange France, Tata Communications and Verizon)
• Innovation initiatives for external services (such as mobile application development and web-based products at Telef?nica Argentina)
• Product development and delivery within a business unit (such as for cloud services at CenturyLink)

While the use cases differ, the reasons for the adoption of agile and DevOps approaches are similar (see Note 1 for further details).

Orange France is two years into its agile/DevOps journey. CIO Koen Vermeulen said that the value to the business is tangible: "Reducing the 'time to first use' and improving 'fitness for use' are the primary reasons for adopting this approach. It increases autonomy and responsibility of project teams, and we have been able to reduce the implementation delay for projects by a factor of five to six times."

Tata Communications has experienced similar benefits. Global CIO Rupinder Goel stated: "Through use of DevOps, we have been able to significantly improve the impact IT has to business value. It's not just a matter of doing things faster; it's also about increasing effectiveness in terms of delivering tangible value in a 'co-creative' way with the business."

Likewise, Brian Button, director of Software Engineering in the CenturyLink Cloud business unit, has seen direct benefits relating to responsiveness and value generation: "The cloud world moves very quickly, and a long, drawn out development cycle would have produced products too slowly to serve our customers. Adopting DevOps approaches has provided the most effective way to go from concept to a product in production. It lowers the risk of building the wrong thing in the wrong way."

All the CSPs interviewed for this research have experienced challenges in pursuing their DevOps journeys. 2 Figure 1 shows the impacts to CSPs that are beginning their adoption of DevOps, and the top recommendations to address the challenges they typically face.

Figure 1. Impacts and Top Recommendations for CSP Adoption of DevOps

Source: Gartner (July 2016)

Impacts and Recommendations

Communications service providers (CSPs) that have adopted agile methods have been able to improve their time to value for IT-related initiatives

Traditionally, waterfall has been the mainstay development methodology in CSPs. However, over the past five to six years, Gartner has seen many CSPs adopt and become mature users of agile methods. 3

These CSPs say that agile has greatly enhanced their time to value for IT development projects, and has gone some way in changing the overall culture and agility of the IT organization. However, because operations leaders are historically the focus of blame for operational incidents, they are reluctant to relinquish a measure of control to self-organizing and empowered DevOps teams.

DevOps initiatives go some way in addressing this issue, because they apply agile values to the deployment, environment configuration, monitoring and maintenance tasks, thereby removing hindrances that are often encountered postdevelopment. 4 DevOps prescribes that operational staff members join the cross-functional development teams. This consolidation creates full-service teams that are capable of supporting the entire development life cycle.

As such, DevOps initiatives often incorporate a combination of agile practices and lean principles, in addition to DevOps principles:

• DevOps is the cultural aspect requiring tools that enable collaboration between development and operations activities/personnel, and the capture and measurement of metrics to aid in the establishment and realization of business results.
• Agile practices for adaptive software development require tools that must exhibit capabilities to enable fast feedback cycles and early customer involvement.
• Lean principles optimize the end-to-end process, removing pipeline bottlenecks and helping to identify and remove wasteful activities.

Tata Communications is only two years into its agile/DevOps journey, and has already experienced significant improvements in terms of how IT collaborates with business and operations teams. "DevOps has allowed us to work more collaboratively with the business, hand-in-hand," said Goel. "The business and operations teams now have a better understanding of IT in terms of what's required and how we can help. Now we are much better at responding to their needs and delivering value. It allows us to operate in a centralized, shared services kind of way, but with greater collaboration and an understanding of end-to-end delivery than we had prior to the adoption of DevOps."

Getting started and maintaining momentum require focused effort

The CSPs we spoke to for this research took similar approaches to initializing their DevOps initiatives and projects.

In Orange France's case, CIO Koen Vermeulen said that providing a location wherein development and operations teams (which were previously unfamiliar with agile/lean/DevOps techniques) were given explicit guidance gave them a learning environment that helped them gain confidence and experience: "We found that setting up a lab with experts that do real projects together with people who do not have the expertise is a natural way of spreading best practices. We also have a knowledge room where best practices are continuously adapted and updated by the project teams. Ninety percent of the people [who have] participated don't want to go back to the 'old way' of doing projects."

In the CenturyLink Cloud business unit, Brian Button explained a similar approach: "We start new teams as we begin working on new products. The teams last as long as the product survives, instead of being project-based. This gives us the continuity needed to consistently grow and improve each team, rather than forming and reforming constantly. Our teams work mostly independently, each totally responsible for their own product line. They handle everything from the requirements end, having a product owner and product analyst as full team members, to development of both the product and its supporting infrastructure, and support it after it is deployed into production."

Verizon established transparency across functionally isolated and globally distributed development and operations teams by setting up common dashboards and toolchains so that all teams could have visibility into what was being done and foster cross-learning. This has encouraged cooperation and improved skills levels and communication across what were previously disjointed teams.

Recommendations:

• Create a holistic vision for IT development and delivery capabilities that includes the creation of full-service product teams. Ensure that the strategy is clearly understood in order to drive buy-in and execution (see "Step 1 in Delivering an Agile I&O Culture Is to Know Your Target State" ).
• Establish learning environments where teams can feel comfortable experimenting and learning new ways of working, and staff them with coaches who actively participate in projects and share practical experience.

Agile methods are a valid first step toward DevOps in CSPs, but achieving scaled adoption across the IT organization can be challenging

Getting a consistent view of what agile or DevOps means across teams spanning multiple sites within IT is difficult enough. This is amplified when interfacing with the broader organization (including partners) that has cultural and procedural differences.

The adoption of DevOps calls for CSP CIOs and IT leaders to become agents of cultural change, empowering their teams to work collaboratively with the business and become outcome-oriented rather than task-oriented. It also calls for discipline in terms of architecture and standardization. Without this, the diversity and technical debt can build up very fast.

The CenturyLink Cloud business unit experienced procedural issues in aligning with the wider organization. Brian Button said, "Communicating some of the reasons behind why we act as we do has been difficult. We tend to have shorter intervals between releases that create challenges when coordinating between teams. Other aspects of the cloud business unit are different than those of the wider CenturyLink organization, which makes communication across that boundary that much more important. We operate across multiple sites, so communication and building trust have been difficult at times, but is steadily improving."

To address a similar challenge, Verizon established an IT DevOps council — a cross-organizational core team formed in 2015 to drive DevOps adoption and synchronize activity and standards across the various IT teams in Verizon. A key role of the council is to foster collaboration and learning. It uses techniques such as gamification (for example, a DevOps cup and game days), and holds "brown bag" sessions to encourage learning and the application of new technologies and skills. The intent is to generate a creative, "fun" working culture and, ultimately, to scale DevOps globally.

Luciana Barrera, CIO of Telef?nica Argentina, has also taken a formal, program-oriented approach. "We created a new team with people from all over the company, defined a training plan, identified the tools and platforms we wanted to use, and adopted DevOps philosophies."

Communication was also a challenge that Orange France CIO Koen Vermeulen had to address: "Misunderstanding of what the approach is about was an issue at the beginning. Ensuring the transformation happened in depth, in the DNA of the organization, and not just on superficial processes, was another challenge we had to work through."

Achieving scale, such as applying DevOps initiatives to very large application portfolios (more than 1,200 in one case), is another substantial challenge. All the CSPs we interviewed have not waited for ultimate DevOps "maturity" to occur; rather, they have attempted to begin performing continuous delivery with a select group of applications. Not all applications in a portfolio are at the same level because their respective starting points are different. Therefore, not all DevOps techniques can be applied to all applications (see Note 1). Orange France, for example, began by assessing the maturity of each application (doing so with both development and operations teams) using what it calls a "DevOps meter." This provided a standardized way of indicating what the next step would be in the journey to full continuous deployment for each application.

The benefit of this kind of approach is that it quickly identifies where gaps may exist in terms of roles, processes and technology. From a technology perspective, these efforts may not achieve scale; however, this is not really a negative because it's in harmony with the DevOps concept of continuous improvement.

In addition, revised architectures, tooling and the use of open APIs to facilitate integration become essential enablers. To deliver at DevOps speed (and scale), the technology framework must be designed for "human by exception," where as much work as possible is automated.

Recommendations:

• Define clear roles and communicate objectives, but let the team have as much flexibility as possible in defining how work will get done.
• Scale the tool architecture through the application of service-oriented architecture (SOA)-style techniques, including concepts such as modularity. These open platforms should enable and expose capabilities from the network, IT, data and customer experience layers.

Ingrained views about technical governance, perceived risks and overall resistance to change can impede the CSP's ability to alter project methods

An essential aspect of DevOps is encouraging collaboration between the historically isolated business, development, test and operations groups. As with any change, DevOps is disruptive and unsettling.

DevOps is controversial because it challenges conventional IT thinking. Traditional approaches add process rigor and ignore organizational barriers, but DevOps does the opposite — it implies process, but allows each implementation to define and continually adjust to improve the desired outcome. It is this lack of prescriptive guidance that has stalled many IT organizations from implementing a DevOps strategy.

All the CSP CIOs interviewed for this research said that people issues outweighed most other challenges. Resistance to change was, by far, the biggest inhibitor mentioned, followed by skills gaps and a reluctance to collaborate. Therefore, implementing DevOps requires more than simply pulling the operations personnel into the fold and forcing them to adapt to their new setting. Other participants in the development life cycle must also change their responsibilities and collaboration practices to reflect the inclusion of operations experts.

CenturyLink, for example, looked to deliberately address this issue. Brian Button said, "It was important to engage the people in the process of creating value as a way of drawing in the right kind of employees for our products. The kinds of people that we wanted to hire were looking for dynamic, interesting environments, and a traditional approach to managing projects wouldn't have brought them into our company. It created and preserved the culture that we wanted. We believe in the Agile Manifesto, 5 where it states that the best teams are empowered teams who face up to their own challenges and solve them on their own. This lets our people contribute at their best every day, which is a huge incentive for someone to stay, and a great way to have fun at work."

Tata Communication's Rupinder Goel said, "One of the first issues we faced was with people's comfort levels in terms of new ways of working. IT people were used to dealing with tasks within their own sphere of experience. Suddenly, they were being asked to get involved with subjects and matters in which they didn't feel completely confident." It became apparent to Goel that he needed to apply additional focus and effort into change management. "We started to run workshops and training sessions, helping people learn and get comfortable with the move to outcome- rather than input-based collaboration."

Getting very clear on the benefits of agile and DevOps and articulating this in meaningful ways to various stakeholders were key success criteria mentioned by the CIOs we interviewed. Koen Vermeulen said, "We measure the benefits of projects and communicate these to the IT teams involved and the wider business. This, along with delivery of tangible results, has helped us break down long-established perceptions of IT. The conversations I have with the business are shifting from 'How much does IT cost?' to 'How much should we invest in IT to get a business return?'"

DevOps doesn't succeed unless all stakeholders have a set of common objectives and trust that their colleagues fully support them. While some organizations choose to realign their structures to achieve collaboration, the case examples here show that this is not a requirement. What is required, however, is agreement on the mission and the measures of success. This is facilitated through transparent and frequent communication.

Recommendations:

• Address common people issues such as misaligned team goals, skills gaps and resistance to change. What can be perceived as resistance is often a lack of direction and leadership.
• Foster collaboration by clearly communicating expectations for change and proactively leading teams through cultural, talent and mindset challenges.

Gartner Recommended Reading

"Lead IT Cultural Change and Transformation in CSPs Through the Adoption of DevOps"

"Avoid DevOps Disappointment by Setting Expectations and Taking a Product Approach"

"Avoid Failure by Developing a Toolchain That Enables DevOps"

"Changing Governance to Exploit Enterprise Agile"

"How to Scale DevOps Beyond the Pilot Stage"

Evidence

1 This research is primarily based on a mix of written responses we received from and a set of structured discussions we held with five large CSPs about their agile and DevOps journeys. The discussions took place (and the written responses were received) during April and May 2016. Two of the CSPs are based in North America (CenturyLink and Verizon), one is based in Europe (Orange France), one is based in Latin America (Telef?nica Argentina) and one is based in Asia (Tata Communications). This primary data source is supplemented by our insights from ongoing inquiries with our CSP clients. The participants responded with varying degrees of depth, coverage and content.

2 For further insight, see "Lead IT Cultural Change and Transformation in CSPs Through the Adoption of DevOps" and "Seven Steps to Start Your DevOps Initiative."

3 In Gartner's 2016 CIO survey, 57% of CSPs responded that they had adopted bimodal IT. Of these, 93% said they are using agile project management (see "2016 CIO Agenda: A CSP Perspective" ).

4 See "Embrace DevOps Product Teams to Turbocharge Your I&O Organization and Control Costs."

5 See the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development."

Note 1

Details on the Adoption and Use of DevOps in CSPs

Table 1.   CSP DevOps Deployments Vary by Use Case and Maturity

Enlarge Table

CenturyLink Orange France Tata Communications Telef?nica Argentina Verizon Systems or applications supported

Mission-critical IT services

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Digital business

Y

Y

Y

Y

Mobile apps

Y

Y

Y

Data and analytics (BI)

Y

Y

Y

Y

E-commerce

Y

Y

Y

Internet of Things (IoT)

Y

Y

ERP

Y

CRM

Y

Y

Y

Customer-facing applications

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Identity management

Y

Y

Application architectures supported

Service-oriented architecture

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Online transaction processing (OLTP)

Y

Y

Microservices

Y

Y

Y

Y

Practices and/or process concepts used

Automated testing

Y

Y

Y

Y

Continuous integration

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Automated builds

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Release automation

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Continuous testing

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Continuous delivery

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Test-driven deployment

Y

Y

Y

Common metrics

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Minimum viable product

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Small batches

Y

Y

Optimize flow

Y

Y

Test everything

Y

Y

Y

Feature flags

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Canary rollouts

Y

Y

Technologies used

Release automation

Y

Y

Y

Y

Automated testing

Y

Y

Y

Y

IT operations management

Y

Y

Y

Application performance monitoring

Y

Y

Y

Y

Y

Service virtualization to support layered testing

Y

Infrastructure as code

Y

Y

Y

Toolchains

Y

Y

Y

Y

ITSSM tool suite

Y

ITSSM = IT service support management

Add/Remove Columns×

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Source: Gartner (July 2016)