A Successful DevOps Strategy Is More Than Just Technology

To start, DevOps is exactly what it sounds like — a combination of software development and IT operations that shortens the product lifecycle and delivers a higher quality operational performance, benefiting the company and customer alike. But it’s more than that — it’s a cultural shift and a methodology that expands upon agile and lean software development principles in a manner necessary to drive the shift from an on-premise, product-centric culture to the SaaS, service-centric alternative that is the keystone of most modern technology businesses. Top companies in industries from retail to technology use DevOps to improve efficiency and accelerate the distribution of product enhancements. It’s not a question if DevOps can help your company upgrade its product cycle; it’s a question of how well you can implement it into your organization.

My company has embraced DevOps to not only improve the IT processes inside our organization, but to also reshape the teamwork and mindset of everyone involved in product development. This, in turn, has benefited many of Experian’s partners and clients, as it has enabled them to leverage fast delivery of value and enjoy strong, resilient service in production. DevOps considers people, processes and technology. By combining IT operations and development, companies can optimize the flow of ideas to product creation — but this also requires a cultural shift in the company. You can always update technology, but unless you also change the organization and improve the way the teams work together, DevOps will be incomplete.

The key is giving your employees the ability to innovate and the tools and trust to do it quickly. DevOps ties software development with rapid IT service delivery, leveraging end-to-end agile, lean practices in the context of a whole-system-oriented approach. The mindset that is required from everyone in the flow of value creation is a focus on how to achieve that system-oriented outcome. As mentioned, the other key element to successfully implementing DevOps is technology itself, especially automation tools that make the complete flow and pipeline of development and testing repeatable and reliable.

When we test our products, we use Amazon Web Services — a company that has been outspoken about how it uses DevOps to shorten the time it takes to improve its servers and other solutions. AWS accomplished this by breaking down its large teams into far smaller but autonomous units which move faster. Previously, its development and operations teams were huge entities each working on one task, robbing them of innovation time. By making teams smaller and giving them autonomy, changes and improvements came faster, and each team assumes ownership of its contributions. Collaboration improved, and AWS also invested heavily in automation and metrics, so it was easier and faster to monitor, log and trace issues for improvement and fix mistakes.

There is much to learn from AWS when it comes to DevOps. Large teams became smaller, but by assuming ownership of their tasks, each team knew what it was responsible for. By placing operations and development together, it eliminated finger-pointing and improved collaboration. It almost makes each small team a business that has a specific task, and when code is ready for gamma testing, it is vigorously tested for potential failure, so potential problems are addressed before it is deployed. Once implemented into production, the code is tested on a single function so bugs only impact that specific feature. If that succeeds, it is slowly rolled out to more functions until it is globally available.

Compare this with the DevOps in your own organization. How long does it take to get new or improved features to market? When you hit a roadblock, does a team or department take responsibility or do different developers blame each other for the problem? Are development and operations working together, or is everyone siloed? Are your new product launches consistently delayed due to insufficient data or analytics to chart progress?

Improving the DevOps process can make a sea of change across every part of your product’s lifecycle, and what’s most fascinating is that the most important elements do not require a huge IT investment. Changing the way you configure your teams, streamlining the process and encouraging task ownership will benefit your employees, who are now more experiencing a work environment shift due to Covid-19. Getting your products out faster with greater testing and analytics will benefit your salesforce and your customers. 

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Article Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/01/31/a-successful-devops-strategy-is-more-than-just-technology/?sh=5ff821903193