Transformations & evolution of a true DevOps team

As teams shift from waterfall to agile , they have to unlearn and learn the new ways of working , role and responsibilities , getting used to commitment and delivery , daily plans and sprints . All this will have take certain inertia and time of the teams involved to settle in.

As more complex it may get with many teams involved in scaled agile , at program level more time it takes for baseline stage where all teams understand the inter-team dependence , features teams vs component teams , build and release that integrate the work of # of teams . All this will require coordination , communication , sync and cadence.

Devops is a cultural shift that yields on top of the agile momentum . It works with dev and ops teams working as 1 team , automated CI CD , and simplified automated processes bu tools .

Blue ( development ) and green ( Operational ) teams work initially separately .

Initially , Operational activities are generally carried by a cluster team supporting many development teams. The teams coordinate with this horizontal group to build , deploy and release . All this may lead to bandwidth dependency - hence delays and hence lead time to deploy , mean time to recover may be higher.

This is not a perfect stage but a necessary essential when starting off to a org wide transformation .

What would be ideal ?

Well, it would be a team that is unified dev + ops together . There is no one ( or very minimal support ) they depend on from code->design-> build->test->build->deploy ->to release , fix and re-deployment , monitor and etc..etc..

How can this team get to that true end state ?

• It is over time - via cross pollination of operational activities in core team , operational people even pick up dev tasks . So learn additional activities and cross skill becoming a true T-shaped team . Still for L2 activities that span across 24 hours you may need a lean team spread over time zones to attend.

• This aided with automation - test and CI CD pipeline with auto triggers that make checking of code to deployment and monitoring a non human intervention . In picture above we see set of tools that can be connected and auto triggered covering all SDLC activities .

Shared services team must be carved out and support such devops teams as a cluster or pool attending to teams @ capability level or @ ART level ( SAFe )

Shared services is set of specialists helping the core devops group.