DevOps World Award Winners on DevOps Radio: Part 1

Source:-https://www.cloudbees.com

At the recent DevOps World, we announced the winners of the DevOps World 2020 awards. In this week’s DevOps Radio episode, we hear from two of the winning teams.

Ben Angel is the head of DevOps engineering at Nationwide Building Society, where he leads strategy and DevOps adoption. His team won the DevOps Rising Star award, which recognizes a CloudBees customer that has embarked on a DevOps transformation within the last year and has seen immediate positive results out of the gate.

According to Ben, the company’s DevOps journey really started two to three years ago. ”We started to look at what DevOps could do for us. And it showed us, showed the wider organization, the benefits that DevOps could provide when we implement proper CICD agile ways of working,” he explained.

From there, Nationwide Building Society set out to apply these principles to their key business functions to improve efficiency associated with being a highly regulated business. “What DevOps has enabled us to do is to automate some of the key processes. So I’m thinking of data archiving and GDPR requirements,” he shares. The organization was focused on providing benefits to its members and quickly moved to an MVP approach that prioritized delivering value as quickly as possible. This set them on the road to becoming a DevOps World 2020 awards winner.

Turning to the other award winner featured in this episode, we hear from Rupesh Kumar, solutions director – agile/DevOps at Citizant, and his colleagues in the client organization, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The joint team won the diversity in DevOps award. This award recognizes an organization that has done two things: (1) Implemented diversity and inclusion practices within its DevOps community that embrace the uniqueness of all employees, and (2) Adopted practices that empower and celebrate team members to spur innovation and stronger business outcomes.

Rupesh shares how the two teams came together to implement DevOps practices, while addressing the many silos that existed in the IRS as a large federal agency. “We actually started doing a lot of experimentations. We had a joint innovation lab set up within IRS where we did a lot of analysis to see how can we fail fast,” Rupesh explained.

From there, the team came up with a solution that worked for 45 of the agency’s applications. Now, the team is scaling this approach and sharing what it had learned across the agency. This means educating colleagues and garnering buy-in. One thing everyone on the team agrees with is that innovation comes from their team members.

“DevOps is just not technology and tools,” said Rupesh. “It’s people and process, and they are the one who actually drive the innovation.”

To learn more about the DevOps journey of the DevOps World 2020 awards winners, Nationwide Building Society and the IRS/Citizant, a listen to episode 85 of DevOpsRadio.