Hype (Pitfalls of implementing DevOps 1/5)

This article is the first part of the: Five pitfalls of implementing DevOps

From the previous article, the 5 pitfalls:

1. Hype
2. People, people, people
3. Cheap and cheerful
4. Basis is not there
5. Bunnings syndrome

Hype

It can’t be denied that DevOps is still a hype and as a CIO you must tell the board and the rest of the world that you are doing or trying to do DevOps, because there are a lot of success stories by companies like Google, Facebook, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon that have booked great successes with DevOps.

Ground results in business outcomes

Many organisations launch a DevOps initiative with insufficient consideration of business outcomes. Managers that take the approach of "doing DevOps for DevOps' sake" risk failure because employees do not connect with the term "DevOps" or the underpinning tools and approaches. Instead, staff connect with the value that the effort will bring to the organisation and to themselves. To avoid doing DevOps for DevOps' sake, connect DevOps with customer value by considering the following:

·        What are the business outcomes the customer is trying to accomplish and by when?

·        How quickly will new functionality need to be released?

·        How often are there outages in production that take long to resolve with client impact?

·        How often do requirements change during a project?

Doing too much too quickly

If higher level management is doing DevOps just for the sake of it, it is highly likely that they don’t fully understand what they get and they also don’t know how to roll out DevOps. The idea of launching DevOps in a single step — often referred to as a "big bang" manner — might be enticing and other organisations are fully transformed already, but history shows that traditional transformation approaches have a high failure rate. DevOps involves too many variables for this type of approach to be successful in a medium to large IT organisation. An incremental, iterative approach allows organisations to focus on continual improvements and avoid the excessive risk of a rapid, all-inclusive approach. It enables organisations to get the necessary elements in place to sustain adaptable organisational change. Organisations learn with each iteration, improve and course-correct to keep moving forward.

Failure to manage expectations

A result of the hype is a disconnect in many organisations between people's expectations for DevOps and what it can deliver. Expectations need to be managed by agreeing on objectives and metrics. For example, rather than saying "we will be more agile or faster", establish where the organisation is and where it needs to be, and then pursue that goal iteratively. DevOps is not a one-time effort; rather, it's about trying over and over again.

Whatever path enterprises take to DevOps, they must start with Steve Jobs’ maxim: Start with the customer and work backwards. First establish processes and add tools to create DevOps pipelines. Deliver enough and constant value to maintain support from the customer and the own leadership. Read the book "The Phoenix Project" if you like to understand more about flow and putting the customer central.