DevOps
This article refreshes a perspective originally published in 2018: Why your business should care about DevOps
TL;DR
This blog will continue to argue that the organization’s willingness to experiment and its prevailing views of failure are the key enablers, or deterrents, to change.
DevOps reduces operational risk without sacrificing the vital learning opportunities. This commitment to learning is a key enabler to the success of emerging DevOps teams.
A great example of an insiders view on DevOps is offered by DevOps Dojo
More DevOps savvy, less tools
DevOps, or other combinations of (Biz|Dev|Sec|Ops), helps reinforce the organization’s capability to to deal with business changes in the wake of disruptions. It is a compliment to the strategic planning work, providing the approach for organizations to hypothesize, validate assumptions and adjust to changing conditions.
However, despite the accelerated digital transformation and a global pandemic many organisations continue to conduct business-as-usual with out-dated procurement, technology, and implementation practices. For instance, *Transformation project RFPs are awarded to staff augmentation firms. *Transaction confirmations by fax still occur. *Some cybersecurity and infrastructure squads still do not have software development skills on their team.
How can we reconcile these observations in the context of digital economies and platforms as services? And how is this related to DevOps?!?
This blog will continue to argue that the organization’s willingness to experiment and its prevailing views of failure are the key enablers, or deterrents, to change.
Experimenting towards purpose and value
When this post was first posted the World Economic Forum published new digital business models are the principal reason why just over half of the names of companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since the year 2000. See Digital disruption has only just begun.
Since then, the World Economic Forum has committed to helping companies leverage technology to become more agile in the face of disruption, and to fostering digitally-enabled business models. Digital Economy. There is little doubt that the digital enablement of business, and entire industries in well underway.
But try that telling those transacting by fax, leading transformation by staff-aug, or ignoring software practices.
Fail fast, fail forward
Somewhere along the way, under the pretext of risk management, failure was cast out of the club of viable leadership moments. In fact, organizational structure, processes, and workplace culture have traditionally reinforced patterns of risk avoidance.
DevOps, on the other hand, assumes that things will fail and makes it safe to do so early in the cycle. Designing for failure and shifting-left are DevOps practices that handle failure gracefully. Indeed, learning to fail forward is a key step in beginning to frame mindsets around failure. DevOps reduces operational risk without sacrificing the vital learning opportunities. This commitment to learning is a key enabler to the success of emerging DevOps teams.
Through Devops organizations can de-risk new customer or citizen interaction modalities, build an advantage through mining online telemetry, differentiate through usability feedback, and strengthen the solutions through unsuccessful builds, failed test cases, and new security vulnerabilities. Devops turns a low-time-to-failure into a competitive advantage.
Trust in teams
The ability for DevOps teams to deliver from end-to-end and address cross-cutting concerns is what sets them apart. DevOps teams include all the necessary roles in the delivery process: from business leaders to process designers, security experts, quality assurance, as well as the developers and operations roles.
One of the key benefits of introducing DevOps processes and culture is that it removes the communication barriers between teams and the reliance on any single individual for progress to be made
The moment organizational leadership realizes the impact DevOps teams can have on the current practices is a key inflection point. There are (at least) two possibilities:
- they will be made to navigate existing processes (and all progress halts)
- they will be given the latitude to define new methods. For this reason, selecting the right initiative, and the right team, as an initial pilot becomes crucial.
More than a checklist exercise
Teams don’t “do DevOps”, much like they don’t “do Agile”. They adopt an Agile mindset and live DevOps. Organizational commitment to learning is crucial to success. It’s important to remember that:
- A team cannot do this alone – they need a coach.
- This will not be flawless – there will be learning moments.
- You must unlearn - skill sets and responsibilities will change.
- It is not for every product at first – and not intended for maintenance work.
- It is not for everyone - the change can be overwhelming.
Way forward - Mainstream
The typical way forward DevOps with GitHub on Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization and completing the required certification exam: Azure DevOps Engineer
Way forward - Insiders
A great example of an insiders view on DevOps is offered by DevOps Dojo
Beyond the tooling and the usual topics, Dojo also covers the following topics:
- Dojo – People & Teams
- Dojo – Experiential Learning
- Dojo – Customers & Trust
- Dojo – Culture & Mindset
- Dojo – Product Centric Model – Part 1
- Dojo – Product Centric Model – Part 2
- Dojo – Product Centric Model – Part 3 Dojo – OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
- Dojo – InnerSourcing
- Dojo – UX/Accessibility
- Dojo – ArchitectureComing soon
- Dojo – Technology Coming soon
- Dojo – Secure DevOps Coming soon
- Dojo – SRE Coming soon
If you are so inclined, also explore What the Hack - 014 - OSSDevOps : DevOps is a journey not a destination.