DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts across the industry – including analysts, consultants, vendors and even users – what they think is the most important cultural change an organization can make to ensure DevOps success. The result is a broad range of answers that delves deep into what DevOps is really all about. Part 2 covers the relationship between Dev and Ops teams.

Start with Top Culture Changes to Make DevOps a Reality - Part 1

9. COMBINE DEV AND OPS INTO ONE TEAM

The word "DevOps" says it all, combining development and operations which have had inherently separate cultures, metrics, mindsets and tools — not to mention the need to include IT Service Management teams for added support in governance, change management and continuity. So the top culture change is in reality an active melding of cultures in which speed, relevance, risk, cost effectiveness and business value are all integrated into a single cohesive dialog. More easily said than done, but it needs to happen.
Dennis Drogseth
VP of Research, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

The most important cultural shift to making DevOps a reality is breaking down organizational walls to cultivate a "same team" atmosphere. You would be surprised how quickly frequent and consistent interactions create trust and accountability. Embed developers into your operations team, and operations into development. Bringing people from different disciplines together will help you identify and define common goals and initiatives. Chaining together the systems and tools they use will make their processes and workflows more transparent and effective.
Adam Serediuk
Director of Operations, xMatters

10. CO-LOCATION OF DEV AND OPS

From a practical perspective, if possible, try to co-locate people involved along the delivery pipeline as much as possible, so they are working together in the same space/office. This will streamline communication and feedback loops, and have them more easily collaborate towards a shared goal. Steve Brodie
CEO, Electric Cloud

11. BREAK DOWN SILOS

DevOps introduces an uninterrupted development model and requires companies to break the barriers between isolated groups to create a continuous system which moves applications along every step from design all the way to production. It is impossible for DevOps to truly succeed in siloed environments where there is often a waterfall-esque handoff model for projects and deployments between traditional compartmentalized groups. Until organizations integrate a continuous and collaborative process between various business groups, DevOps will not become a reality.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

Getting people to think horizontally across the delivery value stream and transcend their vertical silos.
Carmen DeArdo
Technology Director, Nationwide Insurance

Julia Wester will be speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit – November 7-9, 2016

The most important culture change required to embrace DevOps in an organization is to forget about the traditional silo approach. Departments are no more responsible for their own delivery but rather everyone is responsible to deliver. While this sounds a bit like starring through rosey glasses, the fact is that the whole idea of DevOps and DevSecOps grew out of the agile movement which is based on breaking teams and creating cross functional groups. Once people understand that they all have the same goal, mistakes are addressed in a positive blameless manner and issues are addressed in a much healthier and efficient way.
Amit Ashbel
Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx

An IT organization can tackle DevOps challenges by transforming to truly assure the success of the business. Infrastructure, operations and development teams can no longer live in silos: it gets in their way of delivering a flawless user experience and assuring the business meets the rising expectations of customers. As enterprises travel down the path of Digital Transformation, winning or losing in the "always on" economy hinges on collaboration through a common situational awareness and by forming IT partnerships using insights into everything. Getting there requires deep and unrestricted visibility into continuous application and service delivery, especially in infrastructures with lots of moving parts that include digital innovations like virtualization, cloud, UC and mobility. When doing it right, essentially making the complex simple using smarter data and real-time analytics, IT teams can be more agile in delivering applications and services faster, at scale and with higher quality.
Ron Lifton
Senior Enterprise Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

12. INCLUDE OPS IN DETERMINING SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

During the planning phase, inclusion of IT Ops in determining the system requirements for an application is of paramount importance.
Kishore Ramamurthy
Senior Director, Product Marketing, Optanix

13. CROSS FUNCTIONAL MEETINGS

Common biweekly stand-ups between those who are writing the application code, those who are writing the automation to deploy the code and those who are running operations is an important culture change that will enable smooth communication between the teams.
Payal Chakravarty
Program Director, Product Management - IBM APM

14. BREAK DOWN SILOS BETWEEN DEVOPS AND QA

A DevOps culture is one of breaking down barriers between the silos that have existed for decades between Dev and Ops, but also QA. Since DevOps is really Dev-QA-Ops, the 5-10 QA silos that exist (unit test, functional, performance, compatibility, database, security, APM etc.) must all be broken down so everyone is working cohesively together, with similar use cases and re-using all work across the chain of testing. At its core, DevOps is about a no-silo environment that allows teams to move rapidly, where speed is the fundamental result. Speed with quality of course. Breaking down the physical barriers, as well as the psychological ones, has been challenging for even the best enterprises because change is hard and often not easily embraced.
Kevin Surace
CEO, Appvance

Check out Top Culture Changes to Make DevOps a Reality - Part 3, covering collaboration and communication.