How to get IT Ops and Dev Ops to work together

I have been in Operations for 20 plus years, but now getting asked this question more than ever. Given the rising popularity of DevOps—according to RightScale's State of the Cloud report, DevOps adoption rose from 74 to 80 percent —it's evident that businesses see the value of developers (dev) and operations (Ops) teams collaborating closely. The first thing to understand is the differences between the two. There is no one uniform definition of ITOps. Still, it generally involves IT roles that can't be listed under software development but are responsible for delivering and maintaining services, applications, and the technologies needed to run a business. ITOps includes job titles like system administrator, network administrator, and help desk. DevOps was coined as a combination of software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops). Defining DevOps is even more challenging than defining ITOps because some use it in a broad context to describe a set of practices "intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production while ensuring high quality." In contrast, others use DevOps to describe a distinct role within a company involved in developing, implementing, optimizing, and maintaining custom apps.

Traditionally, development and operations are working towards different—and often contradictory—goals. Developers want creative freedom and the ability to innovate. They are generally under pressure to put out new code quickly to keep up with the fast pace of modern business. Operations want to run that code in a way that is safe, accurate, and under control. Avoiding bugs and downtime can be difficult when deployments are happening quickly. Both teams are correct, and both teams are wrong.

To improve collaboration between Dev and Ops teams, it's best to have a shared understanding of goals. For example, let's say the Dev teams want to improve the frequency of builds being deployed to 100's a day. Simultaneously, the Ops team may wish to maintain the scalability of new features running in production and keep them running smoothly. You can do a few things to help both your own operations team and the development team transition to the new way of doing things. Here are a few ideas:

Shared Goals and Values

Shared Metrics

Recognize Results

Guidelines

Strategy

Align IT and Business Perspectives

The above are just a few ideas around getting started to partner IT Ops and Dev Ops to be successful!