‘The Fear’ Keeping up to date with DevOps

‘The Fear’ Keeping up to date with DevOps

What Happens When You Don’t Keep Up To Date With DevOps

Some organisations fear DevOps, even when the culture is already in place. This is often because DevOps is misunderstood, poorly implemented, or inadequately tracked and validated. This can lead to a culture where there is resistance against the DevOps movement, which can mean that processes stagnate, innovation ceases, and the DevOps model fails to grow along with the business.

If you’re a DevOps leader, or any leader within a DevOps focused delivery chain, you need to have a certain amount of fear. Fear is a great motivator, and without it, you may fail to prepare for and avoid the most common causes of DevOps failure.

‘The Fear’ is not a Mindset of Failure

Fear does not mean that you approach your business in a way where you are sure it’s setup to fail. Instead, it means staying on top of the risks and being aware of the indicators that lead to failure. Not keeping up to date with DevOps is a major problem in organisations. As an example, consider a business that implements DevOps as a set of processes, rather than as a wider culture. Departments can be forced to integrate through structural change and process, but if individual professionals and leaders are not receptive of the DevOps model, they will only perform functions to satisfy the mandatory company policy.

This is damaging in two ways. The first is that morale, productivity, and collaboration is reduced, and second is that without enthusiastic buy-in, you won’t be able to leverage from talented team members who can provide insight and recommendations to improve the DevOps model. Ensuring that the leadership team is not only on board with championing DevOps, but also well aware of the risk of letting DevOps stagnate, is an important first step to ensuring the culture becomes deeply embedded.

Another way that DevOps can fail, is through poor management of workload. DevOps is not a culture that can be forced, and it needs to gradually be implemented in a progressive manner. A successful feasibility study and pilot may show promising signs for DevOps, but if you don’t keep up to date in the way of managing implementation in a production environment, you will risk mismanaging the workload, creating staff burnout, and increasing staff turnover as individuals become dissatisfied and disillusioned with the DevOps concept. How does ‘the fear’ work in this context? You simply need to know the risk and avoid it. Use metrics like staff satisfaction, development and deployment efficiency, and other productivity metrics to determine whether your DevOps model is suited to your production environment. If it isn’t, then changes need to be made.

Change Champions Can Increase Acceptance

If you recognise that people can be the biggest obstacles when implementing DevOps, then you should also recognise that people can be the biggest assets. To keep up to date you need insight and support from a grassroots level. Team leaders are not always the best place to obtain this support, but you can identify individuals who are on board with DevOps, and turn them into champions for the cause. Utilising passionate individuals that are respected by their peers, will facilitate change naturally by increasing buy-in and acceptance. Because these professionals can provide you with valuable feedback on staff concerns, as well as process feedback, you will be in a better position to ensure that your DevOps model is reactive to your unique business needs.

Keeping these points in mind, it is clear that fear can work to your advantage. Know that DevOps can fail, while also knowing what you can do to make sure that it doesn’t. Utilise metrics and staff members, and make sure that the company model is kept up to date in line with business needs and staff feedback. Making compromises in a DevOps environment can allow a smoother transition, while allowing more time for a complete culture shift to take place.

If you’re looking to understand the true benefits of DevOps and how to implement a successful culture – please feel free to contact me on [email protected]