Approach to Enterprise DevOps Transformation Part - 1

1. Introduction

DevOps is a culture where people collaborate to develop, test, deploy and operate using set of practices that automates the processes to increase the ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity with quality. DevOps ensures different teams, Development, Operations, QA, Security etc., come together for development and delivery.

It's important to understand and articulate the maturity state of current development and delivery process before going to initiate DevOps transformation journey. DevOps success depends upon cultural change, shared mindset and bringing in automation capabilities into the delivery process.

In this document, the transformation process has been described suitable for an organization and initiates within a business line or Business Unit. The assumption is the Business unit having multiple applications on different or single technology stack. The business unit want to adopt the DevOps set of practices to improve business agility, quality and faster time to market.

The remaining sections of this document describes on steps to follow for an effective DevOps Transformation strategy and execution.

2. DevOps Maturity Assessment

DevOps Transformation is a journey towards frequent and more reliable release pipeline, automation and stronger collaboration between Development, Operations and Business teams. The DevOps maturity model is designed to help you assess where your team is on their DevOps journey. 

As part of assessment, key stakeholders from the business unit are interviewed to evaluate and understand the current process, culture and tools being used for development and delivery. Information will be gathered in terms of Culture, Automation practices, Platform, Architecture and Methodology. The derived maturity index provides the current maturity state of the business unit and provide recommendations to achieve the desired maturity state.

3. DevOps Transformation - A journey towards continuous improvement

As we know, DevOps requires change in culture, so the expectations need to set with stakeholders on the timelines and process steps. Let's not expect the organization to change overnight, and don't expect the entire organization too change at the same time. Below are the simple steps to move on this journey:

3.1 Support from top management

Firstly, get the required support from top management on execution of such initiatives seamlessly. Without such support, organizational initiatives would fail abruptly and will end nowhere.

3.2 Establish ownership

The Business unit or group, who owns the responsibility for DevOps adoption can take the ownership for running the DevOps initiative. A small team from the business unit, can become the newly formed DevOps Initiators team to initiate the transformation steps. This team could be the BU's Development team, tools group or even an existing operations team, to be a self-motivated team, with the necessary cultural and technical attributes to undertake DevOps adoption. This team should be capable, innovative, collaborative and not burdened with work like critical production schedule etc. This team are the frontrunners for DevOps adoption, and help drive this across the organization. The team should have cross team visibility and commitment so that they can scale this change to the organization level.

The DevOps initiators team is temporary and will dissolve overtime as the enterprise getting matured on standardizing the DevOps practices and processes. 

3.3 Set-up DevOps Center of Excellence (COE)

DevOps COE helps to share best practices, lessons learnt and provide recommendations to get right set of tools for DevOps adoption. COE to be led by an enterprise leader who has the support, and participants of the COE includes representatives from all delivery groups. External DevOps Consultant would initially lead the COE and eventually transitioned over time to internal lead.

COE enables organizations to scale DevOps adoption into enterprise level. Going forward DevOps COE becomes rich source of DevOps repository and owns their own flavor of organization's DevOps framework.

3.4 Establish Governance Model

DevOps governance model to be established to carefully consider how the transformation would affect every aspect of the organization with a clear vision of what to be achieved. A sound governance strategy to cover organizational, financial and operational requirements, and frequent revisit is needed as the DevOps adoption is a continuous ongoing process to facilitate continuous improvement. Cultural change is one of the outcomes of the governance model.

With DevOps, the roles and responsibilities would change and team would understand benefits of cross team collaboration. This model would align its objectives with organization level KPIs.

Typical members of the Governance Model includes Executive DevOps Lead, DevOps Consultant (External) and members from each domain/ technology.

The Delivery Model would use DevOps principles in mind and establish a foundation for delivery. It consists of Change advisory board under the supervision of business executive, which contains the key DevOps practices. These practices would define and help how to move forward using the set of processes and best practices.

The CAB would typically consists of key areas to define the practices are:

• Planning & Measure
• Development & Testing
• Release & Deploy
• Monitor & Optimize