A transformation can’t come from simply changing some tools or tweaking some antiquated processes to create improved collaboration. This is ultimately setting yourself up for a fail. The magic comes from creating a universal change. You want to just improve your “DevOps” Team? Why not improve your entire organization? Be dramatic, organizational opposed to departmental. Sounds long and hard, it will be. But ultimately many companies must pre-disrupt themselves to survive.
Among many other benefits - DevOps breaks down the walls between development and operation teams, but what about the other walls, we (almost) got rid of cubicles and separate offices a while ago – so the walls between the wider teams must also come down to become a modern organization.
1. Change is OK. It’s necessary, it's powerful and its now. Change is about stepping out of our comfort zone and working on new and efficient ways to collaborate, all whilst bringing new processes and modern technologies to complement the needs.
“Our only security is our ability to change.” —John Lilly
2. Take risks or die not trying. In a world of change we can take a few calculated risks along the way, the status quo has changed, and we are continually driving collaboration and communication – when the people get together ideas are born, and let’s give those ideas a shot.
“It is not necessary to change, survival is not mandatory” - Edward Deming
3. Agility across the business. Allocate guilds within the teams to continue to develop and foster this new change of culture. Focus on connecting a small team to another to start with rather than conquering the world and then roll out to more and more teams over time.
“Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent” – Bill Gates
4. Hire the right mindset and not the right tools – The winning hires are the people who join your organization not just to implement some fancy new Orchestration Tool and automate a few processes but to come in with the “multiple hats” mindset. Heard that DevOps is not just a job title? It is. But its more than just an Implementation and Automation engineer – the quicker you understand that the better your DevOps hires and transformation will be.
“If you don't understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance. The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.” Edward Deming
5. Constant Feedback – As part of a successful transformation we must categorize the feedback to the business at the same level of importance as we expect feedback during all phases of Continuous Integration, Testing and Deployment. I have seen many successful transformations in which the business side have been actively involved to ensure feedback was effectively passed along to other teams and departments within the organization. – read a great article from my friend Conor Delanbanque if you are looking to scale your team - https://devops.com/7-steps-devops-hiring-success/
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.” – Elon Musk
About the Author:
Sam Harrison has been responsible for building award-winning international sales teams and has a particular interest in emerging technology trends and innovative methodologies including DevOps, Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter or at various technology conferences across North America.
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