Try these 3 strategies to FIX your DevOps problems!

In my previous post, we saw the Top 3 DevOps challenges faced by organizations today. So let us review how organizations can address these challenges by leveraging the power of systems thinking, feedback loops and cultural transformation at the core, to claim the real promise of ‘agility’ for the customers and stakeholders

TOP 3 SOLUTIONS

·      Build Ownership

The goal is to foster win-win relationships, where the dev and ops team start thinking as a SINGLE UNIT, responsible for end customer delight! This requires the organizations to align the Goals for both the groups and provide the ‘right’ environment for collaboration.

Organizations which understand systems thinking, can help the Dev and Ops teams visualize the FLOW (from concept to cash), and are able to articulate the importance of cycle time, while error proofing and preventing downstream defects (aka. operational headaches).

These teams typically use Value Stream Maps, to share the areas that slow them down (or identify bottlenecks), while building a shared understanding of the complete end to end system. These exercises allow the teams to build empathy for each other’s roles and share the pains, thereby allowing the silo’d groups to start to trust each other and build better relationships over time.

·         Build Shared Practices

The long divide between Dev and Ops can be bridged by amplifying the feedback loops at every step in the end to end delivery cycle and sharing the knowledgebase and increasing transparency across both the worlds.

Organizations typically start this journey by treating Infrastructure as Code, where there is a single repository of truth and everything is version controlled. The teams start thinking about making each step of the highest quality and incorporating feedback from multiple levels – application data, process data, infrastructure dashboards, and business metrics – to highlight pain points early and design shared solutions around the problems. Refer the diagram below highlighting the areas for embedding and/or extending the teams and crossing the systemic boundaries.

Organizations can be seen experimenting with embedding Ops and Dev team members across each other’s groups, which allows for increased empathy (example – Design for Operations), learning’s and increased collaboration.

                                                                                        Source: DevOps Patterns Distilled (Velocity London 2012)

·         Build a Learning Culture

The best ways for bridging the cultural gap between dev and ops is to build a learning culture. Organizations which embrace the learning culture are good at communicating a compelling reason for the change (primarily business outcomes), measuring the new behaviours and giving feedback, creating “triggers” in the work environment that remind teams what needs to be done, and building communities (CoP’s) that support this shared learning

The leadership encourages learning from failures, and is happy to conduct experiments and take risks, promoting a healthy culture of constant innovation while aligning team goals and changing human resources policies.

In the end

Dev-Ops is a long journey and it begins with building a “we” culture among the development and operations teams with shared goals and shared incentives. The improved communication and collective ownership fosters an environment of trust, leading to sharing of ideas, tools, processes and everyone focussed on delivering business value at the end of the day.

Let me know what other solutions you have practiced with your DevOps teams.

Top 3 challenges in your DevOps journey

The 2014 State of Devops survey report clearly shows higher organizational performance linked to the performance of the IT group and it's DevOps practices. But most organizations are still struggling in their IT-DevOps journey  - "only 21% of those familiar with it are using it". In the DevOps journey the main objective of "Collaboration between the Dev and Ops" faces many challenges! Let me attempt to highlight the Top 3 challenges faced by most organizations.

TOP 3 CHALLENGES 

• No Shared Ownership

Most programs typically have Development and Operations as separate teams, with conflicting goals.

The top down goals for development teams are to build features (potentially shippable increments) at short regular intervals so that they can be deployed, with all incentives promoting 'faster' build cycle, versus the operations team goals favor operational stability with changes minimized, in order to maintain existing system reliability and high availability, with incentives for reducing operational costs.

These conflicting goals setting lead to development teams “handing off” the code to operations after development, and operations "pushing back" almost every time.

The overall impact is that the feature 'go live' date is delayed, with both the groups lacking "shared ownership" for reducing the overall feature delivery cycle time from an end customer view point.

• Physical separation

Development and Operations teams are separated by distance, and mostly do not share the same physical location or work area. Most organizations will have centralized operations teams, possibly across time zones for larger enterprises.

The silo'd physical structure is also carried in the silo'd organizational structures with different reporting heads for both the teams, thus ensuring that local optimizations rule the day, with the Operations team members managing and running multiple applications, in closely guarded areas, with restricted access or interaction opportunities with the Development teams.  

How can you relate to someone whom you have never met face to face and never talked? bye bye collaboration !!

• Cultural differences

Cultural differences are visible in the behavior and actions of both the development team and the operations teams. 

The lack of trust and transparency on both sides is what manifest in the communication gaps on both sides, with the development team having minimal visibility on deployment activities and feedback on production systems (read  infrastructure metrics), and the Real business metrics and similarly the operations teams having minimal visibility on what is the expectations on the features wrt.  scalability, run books, or reliability that they should care about to maximize the applications potential and operate as expected by the development team. 

The lack of shared evidence and the missing Shared ownership clearly comes out and creates a sense of mistrust and results in overall delivery delays.


“The developer and operations divide in IT is almost like humidity at times. You can’t see it, but you feel it,” - This quote from the Starabucks devops post sums the challenges....  

what are the challenges do you see in your devops journey?


Look out for my next post which will try to address possible solutions for these challenges...