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What leads to the failure of DevOps: Key steps to reduce the risk

DevOps across industries comes from the need to get better-delivered product and break down silos for efficient collaboration across teams.

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PCQ Bureau
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DevOps

DevOps across industries comes from the need to get better-delivered product and break down silos for efficient collaboration across teams. Technically speaking, it entails two major components from a business perspective, i.e. Developments and Operations.

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However, in simple terms, it is all about creating the right culture in an organization. It is when people in an organisation come together to solve the problems in a streamlined workflow, develop business value and new processes. However, people often fixate on the tools, trying to implement the best layout and create a toolchain. While tools are imperative to operate and deliver the best product, they need not be the key obstacle, but lack of an exponential culture can be.

As per the report by Markets and Markets, the DevOps market size is expected to grow from USD 2.90 Billion in 2017 to USD 10.31 Billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.7% during the forecast period 2018–2023.

Role of DevOps in an Organization

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DevOps doesn’t fail in an organisation, organisations fail in DevOps. To understand this statement, we have to see DevOps transformation as much more than a mere technical transformation. It involves changes across various layers – from organisational structures to ways of working to altering the DNA of Dev and Support Staff. In the digital-first world, moving on from traditional legacy processes to operating with agility and speedy delivery is a must to institute DevOps.

Anupam Kulkarni, Co-Founder & CEO, iauro Systems Pvt. Ltd. Anupam Kulkarni, Co-Founder & CEO, iauro Systems Pvt. Ltd.

DevOps ensures high scalability in more ways than one. Effective communication, one of the key features of DevOps is reflected through team scalability. In addition to the decreased cost in software development, DevOps ensures faster software release, a reduction in software development failure and a faster recovery time. It thus fosters a performance orientation instead of power-play between teams, ensuring software can be scaled effectively.

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Before an organization opts for DevOps, it is crucial to understand the challenges and effective ways to address them.

• Development & Operations Department: The common mistake organisations make while introducing a new process is to start directly with the new idea while introducing a new process. Adding a new department without removing the older process only adds more process and red tape rather than helping to improve the structure. It needs leadership but not in traditional or department based management.

To truly break this barrier, business leaders need to ensure that they share responsibility, are transparent with each other and feedback comes in at each stage of the delivery cycle. The strategy is to implement a framework that allows both groups to interoperate efficiently. Most developers continue to work in silos even after DevOps principles are in place, making the transformation difficult to achieve.

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• Set Realistic Goals: For organisations that are accustomed to working in a siloed structure in the development process, it might get tricky as it infuses cultural shifts with the operations and developments team. DevOps might come as a culture shock, especially for large organisations as they have well-established processes and rapid transformation is difficult at the information, people and process level. The larger the organization, the longer this transformation might take.

While implementing the DevOps strategy initially, keep the process slow to avoid inertia and so that the staff can learn, adapt, and train. Establish the initial level with setting and tracking multiple metric to adopt, then pursue the goal iteratively.

• Lack of coordination: Having a DevOps led pipeline does not just focus on accelerating delivery. Building on innovations, analysing customer requirements and creating software that matches these needs is not just the responsibility of the development team. It’s a collaborative effort of various teams coming together and working in sync.

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The various teams that we need to consider are UI/UX designers, product managers, architects, operations director, release managers, QA staff, business analysts and more. The true goal of DevOps is to offer shared business value to all stakeholders while upholding customer interests. DevOps will succeed when there is coordination and transparency between teams. It’s much more than just a software delivery model.

• Lack of clear visibility: Before moving towards making pre-existing processes faster, better and more cost-efficient through DevOps and automation ask yourself if you have clear visibility on what’s going on across the whole development delivery chain. Unless leaders know where the bottleneck lies, which releases are at risk and why, even several tools will not be able to ensure agility. When everything in the delivery chain is connected you can analyse the effectiveness of the pipeline and see whether it’s yielding business value.

Making culture the focal point of DevOps

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For successful implementation of DevOps in an organization, culture plays a crucial role, backed by collaborative team efforts, shared goals and shared business value. DevOps is a successful outcome of a healthy culture and healthy thinking in an organisation.

When organizations lay a strong emphasis on their culture, DevOps happens naturally. With this, it becomes imperative for organizations to address their cultural gaps in order to build a continuous evolving business and hence a growth mindset.

Moreover, leaders need to play a larger role and focus on measures to be taken for incentivizing the organisation for positive outcome and changes to be made to drive the organisation for achieving its goal. The organisation should encourage independent decision-making by employees and sharing information openly and broadly. The culture in an organisation needs to focus on freedom & responsibility while emphasizing on context over control.

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Key take-aways for Leaders:

• Observe the before-DevOps situation, tools, and behaviour of the software development team

• Identify ‘What They Do’ and ‘What Should They Do and Why’

• Train them not only with the tools, but make them understand DevOps As a Philosophy

• Make this transformation easier by establishing habits from top management

Author: Anupam Kulkarni, Co-Founder & CEO, iauro Systems, Pvt. Ltd.

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