Customer Centric DevOps

If you start to think about your end customer: Do you think he cares about your development process or tools or culture?  Do you think he cares about your operations processes, tools or cultures? He does not. He cares about how well your services helps him solve his problem. If it does not provide good customer experience while working with your product he moves somewhere else.

Generally in a large enterprise teams within the food chain lose focus on the end customer or they do not care about the end customer or they do not know who the end customer is. Ask for example your network engineer or your system administrator or your storage engineer what applications run on the infrastructure or what problem they are trying to solve in those applications. I can assure you more than 95% of them would not be able to answer the question. For over the decades there has been a feeling built into these teams that they are invincible and are more needed for anyone above in the food chain and not other way around. Same is the case with the development, QA, build or release management teams. The business value the application that they are working on, the top line growth or bottom line savings from those is not conveyed to the teams or is not sinking into them. The only teams that work with the end customer like the support/CX/sales/marketing maintain that customer touch and tend to feel the customer pain and try to convey back into the enterprise and for most part are limited to the customer satisfaction surveys. The customer satisfaction surveys or the graphs and pictures are so politically doctored when circulated in the enterprise do not give the true and hard ground realities.     

For DevOps transition to be successful within the enterprise the organization change impact training should involve a great deal about bringing customer/user experience aspect to the front. The DevOps culture change is not about trying to bridge any culture divide between Dev and Ops it is about Dev and Ops trying to cross the customer bridge and provide the good user experience for their end customer.