Successful Scaling: 5 Critical Steps for DevOps Expansion

Over the last five or six years, companies of all sizes have adopted DevOps practices and tools as a solution to increasing the speed and quality of releases. Typically, adoption starts with one or two pilot projects that demonstrate success with DevOps.

But simply using the automation, requirements management and deployment tools of DevOps does not guarantee successful scaling across an enterprise. “One of the mistakes made by senior executives is that they underestimate the amount of challenges it takes to scale DevOps across their organization,” says Jeff Keyes, director of Product Marketing at Plutora, which provides a software delivery management platform to large enterprises. “These leaders sometimes don’t understand that you can’t just turn on DevOps and get immediate results.”

By its very nature, expanding DevOps across an organization requires managing risk to individuals, departments and the organization overall, as significant changes are being made with people, processes and tools. “Adopting DevOps to drive digital transformation is going to be a learning curve, no matter how smart and talented your teams are,” says George Miranda, a consultant with PagerDuty, which helps organizations identify incidents and mobilize response. “Think of the transformation like a J curve: You’re going to experience a trough in the middle while transitioning from traditional software development into a newer more automated world. Your metrics may dip for a bit as you are learning from mistakes and reintroducing the right changes.”