Building a new operating model for DevOps

I’ve been writing about the DevOps challenge facing businesses. At core, it’s about scale: businesses are struggling to achieve the same benefits they see in small-scale DevOps Proof of Concepts when they try and extend them across the 800+ applications typically housed in a large enterprise. If DevOps is to live up to its promise and drive significant value for businesses, then this challenge of scale must be overcome.

Reshaping the business

Today, I want to look at a key change within the enterprise that absolutely must happen before the benefits of DevOps can be realised at scale: operational transformation.

Most enterprises today work around a hierarchical model with a single-direction command & control structure. It is how businesses have been set up since the year dot: a strong ‘c-suite’ leadership at the top of the company sets the objectives and strategy of the firm in a fairly autocratic way. In this model, managers and business unit heads are enforcers of the c-suite’s will, ensuring that their strategic direction is implemented by everyone else in the company. DevOps has risen from the opposite direction - starting from a grass-roots movement of developers and operations staff, moving up the pyramid and now with a seat on the boardroom table.

Democratising development

For DevOps to flourish at scale, this structure needs to be replaced with something much more organic, loose and autonomous. If the old model is autocratic, the new one has more in common with the way modern political revolutionaries coalesce in loosely connected, organisationally ‘flat’ structures.

The ideal operating model for DevOps is one where power is democratised and every individual within the company empowered to take their own lead. Here, the c-suite sets the direction of travel, but then trusts their skilled developers to do what’s necessary to get there. In this model, managers facilitate and empower rather than direct; ensuring developers have everything they need to achieve their goals while gently prodding here and there to ensure their work stays true to the overall corporate agenda and strategic roadmap. This rolls into the macro changes that we're seeing around Liquid workforce and the gradual move to a dis-intermediated world.

It goes without saying that making this transformation won’t be easy. It means overturning centuries of accepted practice and relinquishing the sort of granular control that some people believe promotions and tenure entitle them to. And let’s be clear: IT will bear the brunt of this change. Long the gatekeepers of control, they need to transform into facilitators. IT will set the guiderails and policies around application development, intervening when needed, but in a day-today basis it will need to take a step back and leave its DevOps developers get on with things, a culture of trust and true innovation will then surely thrive.

Putting the experts in control

Developers teams understand the software engineering challenges faced by their businesses better than anyone else in the company. They are ideally placed to get on and solve them, and agile DevOps processes will help them do just that. However, if developers leverage DevOps at scale, they need to be freed from restrictive oversight from IT and the wider business. This isn’t an issue about trust – the HR and analytics technology exists for business leaders to monitor and analyse the effectiveness of developers from afar. It simply comes down to efficiency: removing the barriers in the way of a far more agile and effective development method. It's key to do this in a way that gives you a broad, business centric and vendor agnostic approach. Without the ability to democracies the change and measure the results from our experience you will never succeed fully and get the true benefits.

In my next blog I will look at another key enabler in helping DevOps scale: measurement – so please drop by again.