8 Crucial DevOps Success Tips

Source – news.sys-con.com

Effective collaboration and communication are highly valued by the DevOps culture, and it’s been like that for a reason. It is an industry where even departments within the same company tend to distrust one another, and where distributed offices full of crucial roles are the norm. Thus, any possible positive improvement in the interaction between people is welcomed, especially for an organization where several moving parts need to collaborate in order to create a product on time and within a budget limitation. You need to master communications if you want to master DevOps. Getting your operations and development teams to work together is the concept on which the success of DevOps hinges. These DevOps tips can help you lay out the basis for a DevOps communication plan that’s sustainable.

1. Always remember why you’re doing what you’re doing. The whole system would continue to pick up efficiency and speed if the employees moved from one bottleneck to the next and improve each one. People tend to focus on how they’re performing a task and forget why they’re doing in the first place, also not taking into account the whole IT organization.

2. Value the importance of continuous feedback. Because for creating a successful DevOps plan and measuring its effectiveness, continuous feedback is crucial. Product management, design, development, and every other part of the manufacturing process can use it, because continuous feedback is important for enabling the employees to learn from their mistakes, and to not maintain a linear view of the delivery process, in order to grow.

3. Address security as soon as possible. Security must not be looked as something that can be decided upon later in the development cycle. It needs to exist as a feature of the product, so creating DevOps without addressing the matter of security can be very dangerous to your organization.

4. Always stay transparent. Share all progress and information across the whole organization. Send failure notification and status updates in order to help your organization increase speed, productivity, and stay on the same page.

5. Promote mutual respect and teamwork. These two things cannot be understated, because all of the employees have to work together for the common goal, thus stay on the same page. It is important to have a clearly defined internal communications plan, use communication channels and chat rooms where everyone can discuss the ongoing work, and make sure that the flow of the organization as a whole can’t be interrupted by any one team.

6. The collaboration of the IT and development teams must not be interfered with. It is crucial to prevent any corporate policy do this, because the success of the DevOps will be empowered when the development teams have enough resources and freedom. This will lead to shorter release cycles and reduced deployment downtime. However, the support of this change in organization culture lies in proper management, so the barriers between these two company segments get broken down.

7. Encourage dialog. Are the communications your employees receive open for discussion or are made as statements? Do they seem like they were written by someone who has already decided on the best approach and is just notifying the rest of us? This should be prevented by asking employee’s input for their area of expertise. Always make sure to ask for feedback in the communications by asking flat out what issues they see, through a response to the message, or a requested meeting.

8. Establish an effective time management plan. The need for it comes from the need to achieve process excellence and improve communication. If you want to use DevOps, know that your team may need to change the way they pace their day, tweak schedules, and change long-held habits. The use of it leads to various changes in terms of how people work, why they organize their work in different ways, and what they are asked to do in their job position. Effective time management comes to combining individual and organizational excellence to provide your working team the flexibility to work as efficiently as possible. They need to maintain enough structure to stay on the same page and motivated, while having the freedom to find the methods that work best for them.

As rapid deployment becomes the norm, every business centered around producing software will be challenged by collaboration and communication. Thus, leaders and managers should always pay attention to how their departments work together as a whole. The more familiar your employees are with each other, the better communication will be, and that’s what you need in the process of production.