DevOps - the next step ?!
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DevOps is really not anything new but it has at late really gain momentum and attention also at the major corporations. My guess after that they have looked at all the “new” service companies, Spotify, Netflix, etc…
DevOps is also often presented as the next stage after the Agile movement that focus on removing the walls between requirements, development, and test. By also removing the wall between development and operations we can continue to shorten the real feedback loop and by that increase customer value.
We have been running a change towards DevOps for almost a year now at WirelessCar gaining a lot of experiences:
It’s hard!!!
We are talking about changing culture here! Many, many of the developer and operation guys have never touched the “other” side. Starting my IT career in small by myself and later in small organization where it's a must to do both development and operation. It is really astonishing understanding that a lot of the developers have never operated what they have created and many of the operation guys have never created anything like what they operate! To then be forced by DevOps to learn how the other side works is understandingly a big challenge!
In bigger corporations this has been increased by the big culture difference between service operation departments having ITIL as house god and software development departments with Agile Development as the role model.
Compared when implementing Agile this is harder, much harder. When implementing agile practices all involved professions had meet more or less daily before and they “just” needed to find new way of working, getting closer and taking on the team ownership. When implementing DevOps we often find people that has rarely meet before, maybe once at a while at the Change Advisory Board or at a task force when things does not work.
To help this happen is my experience that you need much more support implementing DevOps compared to Agile. You need to help people understand in practice down to earth what you expect them to do in the DevOps team. But also show how you want to continue to use the strength of both ITIL and Agile Development supporting the culture change much more visually and clearly.
It works!!!
The strength of a cross functional teams is just amazing! When you manage to get all pieces needed into one working team you create fireworks. Combining many such teams is extremely powerful! Changing the real scale you can manage change on.
- We can see effect on shortened lead times, e.g. for fixing production issues, end-2-end or managing delivering of complete new services.
- We can see more robust services with less “big impact” issues losing the complete customer experience.
- We can see bigger commitment in teams to the real values, such as customers impact and end-to-end stability
The main driver for that it works is as I see it that we remove bottlenecks in the full end-2-end chain enabling the individual team to have more or less full control of their own delivery. DevOps is one of the pieces really enabling this to happen but equally important is the architecture and infrastructure support. More on that some other time ;)!
Niklas, thanks for sharing!
Niklas, thanks for sharing!
Nice. In my experience the tricky part though is the same as it has been for decades in the enterprise world - changing the organization structure as such. Culture is not that hard since the internet hype helps you, but the real change is about distribution of responsibility, and doing that at scale and over time requires an organizational form that support it, rather then the opposite. Otherwise it will be a temporary state and go back to the way it was before, just as so many cool agile projects have done in the last 10 years.
Så sant, men det är sällan nån som säger just detta - det är JOBBIGT! :-)