Much Ado About DevOps

During my 20+ years in the information technology operations field I have seen many buzz words come and go, most signifying the application of concepts and ideas that have been around for many, many years. “DevOps” is one of these words that signifies a concept that has been around for a long time: organizational strategic alignment. Pretty simple concept; define what you are trying to achieve and allocate your resources to maximize effectiveness. Sun Tzu referred to this concept as maneuvering; it has been around for a long time.

DevOps is a specific maneuver developed to address the strategic results of reducing development costs, reducing the time it takes to release newly developed software, reducing the rate of defects in developed software and increasing development utilization levels. The core objective of DevOps is to maneuver the contributors of various work streams in the developmental lifecycle into as integrated of a model as you can.

DevOps is a reference model that talks about possibilities. What will or will not work for your organization needs to be custom tailored to your goals and where your organization is on its evolutionary cycle of development. So where do we start?

• Understand your strategic goals and align your efforts to those goals.
• Define your metrics and success criteria. If you don’t understand the metrics behind it, you don’t understand the risk associated with changing it and you will never know if you were successful.
• Develop your hypothesis. If these processes are changed or these people work together differently then we will realize the metrics and success criteria we are after.
• Test your hypothesis in a small controlled setting. Start small, act quickly, fail fast and iterate. Repeat in small batches until the desired results are obtained
• Validate the results have achieved your defined success criteria. Test on a broader scale to ensure repeatability of desired results.
• Implement the proven methodology. Implementation cadence and methodology should resemble past successes.

Should the correct solution for your organizational goals be DevOps or something else you can rest assured that consistent application of the above approach will produce results. Those results will be visible, measurable and reportable as a concrete success. With concrete examples and metrics to back up the story implementation and adoption will be much smoother.

About the author - Brett McParland

Service and operational improvement focused information technology executive with over twenty years of experience translating information technology theory and strategy into action. My passion is leveraging continual improvement concepts to deliver efficient, effective and secure IT services to the business. My expertise is built around successes in solving organizations challenging and lingering issues utilizing iterative cycles to gain traction, provide directionality and build a self-sustaining momentum aligned to strategy.

I encourage you to reach out and start a conversation about your biggest concerns. Often a quick conversation and outside perspective can provide enough insight to set you on the path to change. I can be reached at bmcparland@makeitsilent.com