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.
