4 Tips for Successful DevOps Implementation

Source – virtual-strategy.com

As technology continues to evolve, improve and develop, many companies are focusing on their IT departments to better understand this new technology and making the best use of it. Alongside technology, customer expectations and needs are on the rise as well. The necessity of DevOps implementation is thus also on the rise, as it offers a solution to meeting market demands.

The foundation of DevOps is the effective collaboration between the development and operations teams. That’s why companies who start implementing the DevOps method need to restructure their organization and improve company culture. It’s important to remember that efficient communication and teamwork across departments directly improve the results of DevOps methods. Here are a few tips on how to successfully implement DevOps.

1. Improving Company Culture

In most company cultures, specific departments have specific duties and tasks in accordance with their professions, which is also called a “silo”. Furthermore, there isn’t any meaningful interaction between departments, aside from greeting a fellow coworker who shares the same company space.

The implementation of DevOps is meant to break down these silos and bring departments closer together, in order to improve the efficiency of the development process and allow everyone to share in the same purpose. DevOps culture requires collaboration and teamwork between departments and every company should strive to train their employees to utilize cooperation instead of individuality. The development of soft skills and empathy in both employees and managers is equally important because collaboration won’t be effective without mutual understanding and kindness.

2. Improving Communication

Good communication is essential for the successful implementation of DevOps. With departments working together and collaborating to achieve a certain goal, clear communication is crucial in order to avoid dead ends and mistakes that can lead to much bigger issues.

DevOps is an environment that emphasizes continuous delivery, meaning that without established communication, the number of tasks can pile up really fast during the day. Every company that implements DevOps should strive to create a well-designed internal communications plan that will assist employees in sharing information.

Furthermore, visibility can play a vital role in an environment that also focuses on continuous integration, where software is being planned, designed, altered and released rapidly, like in DevOps. Visibility can enable employees to increase their operational efficiency and stay up-to-date with any changes made, thus helping them adapt quickly and avoid making both big and small mistakes.

3. Monitoring and Feedback

The key element of DevOps is the constant and consistent improvement of the development process. Technically, it’s somewhat of a trial and error method that eliminates linear view and enables learning from past mistakes that have been made and have helped the organization grow.

Every feedback is important, whether from end-users or employees, as it leads to better performance and improved service. That’s why monitoring and feedback coexist closely in this case. For the operations team, monitoring is essential in order to guarantee that the software is performing well and that there are no issues, while for the development team, feedback is crucial for avoiding oversights and detecting malfunctions.

DevOps offers a set of practices that assist a company in improving their development and the delivery of their software solutions to meet customer’s demands and expectations. That is why it’s important to focus on continuous feedback that will ensure the higher quality and delivery of products and services.

4. Scale Slowly

The success of DevOps implementation rests on smaller scale operations and cycles. After all, an organization can’t expect their employees to adapt and adjust from silos based culture to DevOps overnight. Moving slowly will ensure that trust and collaboration will develop properly among departments and that employees will get used to the new way of doing things.

It’s always a good idea to test the newfound environment first, before adopting it company-wide. Educating employees and giving them time to adjust will benefit their confidence and improve their teamwork capabilities. Besides, implementing a DevOps culture fast can backfire, which will not only break down the process and create bottlenecks, but may also halt it altogether, because the company is not properly prepared for it.

Implementing DevOps will allow a company to meet the demands of a wide variety of markets with efficiency, quality and speed, as long as the DevOps culture is implemented properly. Departments will need to learn to trust and respect each other, as well as to collaborate in order to achieve their common goals and fully utilize the DevOps potential.