How you flip DevOps to be Customer-Centric

By Jessica Constantinidis

Finding a team that is willing to change is hard in any organization. During a big shift, there will be failures, there will be tough moments and there will even be outages. All this can prove difficult as you bring teams together to make profound changes to move the business forward and serve the customer. These teams are mostly people who are not afraid to try something new, not afraid of failure and are great people to work with. You will be surprised how many hidden gems your company has hidden in your ranks. Give them a platform to grow and they will be your biggest change coaches, internal and external as they do this out of passion and interest. 

The key to pushing innovation and change within the company is to find the team that wants to try new ways of working and empower them. 

Once you have this team it is crucial to give them the right breeding ground and power to use those DevOps tools and agile methodologies that are focused on being more customer-centric. Companies can gain a huge competitive advantage throughout the software development lifecycle, if it is done right. To increase the speed to market, new ways of servicing or even new ways of connecting to their customers could guarantee a brighter future. By getting over the failures quickly, continuing to preserve, they will lead to seeing some results quickly. Even if the result comes from a previous failure. 

Quick positive results will influence the rest of the "herd", as I like to call it. 

Using DevOps successfully really takes place when biggest focus is the customer in every step. Also embracing failure as a step to success in management is one of the corner stones of the business success. To ensure that happens, there are five key areas in an organisation that can leverage DevOps principles or tools, if done right.

1.     Strategic embrace of new ways of working

Your IT team must be adaptive. When looking at the business and focusing on the right strategy, there should be a new lens in which to you look at what your customer wants first. By looking at what the customer wants first, this allows you to gauge customer satisfaction, get customer insights and ultimately talk to the person using the tool vs. the person that overseeing the tool. Using this approach allows you to measure things correctly.

2.     Organisational silo's broken down to functional groups

Create a team that represents each area that is touched: IT, legal, HR, etc.. Incubation hubs, tactical teams, dream teams, whatever name you might give the team : they all serve the same purpose. Grab the customer need from every perspective in the organisation and align in a smaller more agile team on what you can and cannot achieve. Do not try to build a massive project but improve in smaller achievable projects... 

A bit like the slices of a pizza, they all are part of the pizza and come together to have full view of the project and process.

By doing this, long-term and mid-term decisions are being made by the team with someone that represents the different stakeholders. This allows for total work visibility throughout the lifecycle and accounts for performance measures.

3.     Culture shift: We all lead together 

The DevOps and/or Agile mindset is about unlocking the power of your people. Empowering your people to make smaller but significant decisions on their own, encouragement from management to do this is crucial. Be mindful that some people will thrive in this environment and some might find it difficult to find their way, this is where Human Resources can help and coach. Letting go is difficult for managers sometimes but finding your own priorities might prove to be challenging too.

It’s about going from command and control to aligned and empowered. 

This is achieved by having a centralized knowledge base, where information is shared broadly between teams and management all the way up to the board. The results of this is higher cooperation, increased training, bridging between teammates is encouraged and leads to more enquiry and less risk. This new way of working leads to innovation. 

4.     Working in Sprints: get your sneakers on!

Create an iterative value delivery process, where there are shorter cycles of working or sprints. 

The delivery cycle becomes smaller and the feedback cycle is more immediate.

By creating a smaller cycle, you see some results sooner and the risk is lowered and reduce failure rates. If you do fail, recovery is easier and less of a hassle. Failure is not the issue; it's how you recover that will determine how successful you are. You will fail at some point, trust me, nobody can walk without at least falling a few times, this is a critical learning curve in life but also very much in every organisation.

5.     Automate to Accelerate and reduce risk

You need to have adaptive technology that is lean and agile in your process. Automating processes will allow you to streamline getting assets much quicker and cutdown on unnecessary paperwork. People make mistakes, by using automation some of the easier tasks can be automated to make sure they are repeatable in the same way, without worrying about potential mistakes. DevOps is not about doing the same thing repeatedly, it’s about getting it right, automating it and then improving the automation and introducing new developments. By using more automation, your change failure rate should go down quickly.  

Understanding all these five areas is key to ensure success in the organization and success for your customers. When I talk to clients and partners, what I recognize is that many CIOs are only focused on automation and change technology. 

Understanding the other elements of change from a people and business perspective is also critical to enable organizations to reduce risk and make smaller implementations and small decision that ultimately are less risky. 

As the CIO, your business goal is to be adaptive. That is what a customer-centric DevOps tools allows you to do, but you can only fully achieve it by empowering people and communicating the changes, to change and fully embrace the new culture.