Why do your DevOps projects fail? Here’s why

According to a 2nd Watch report, companies must bring separate operating groups together as a single unit when transforming their business into a full-fledged DevOps organization.

Unfortunately, 78 per cent of IT professionals claimed their organizations still keep separate teams for operations and developments and managing infrastructure. These kinds of key mistakes often are the reason your DevOps projects fail.

But these are not the only reasons. Here are other common errors that could mean your DevOps projects will end up wasting your company time and money.

Failure to use purposeful automation

Organizations must adopt automation throughout the full development lifecycle for DevOps. This includes continuous integration, continuous delivery, and deployment for quality and velocity outcomes. Automation should not be done in silos like incident management or change management.

Only purposeful end-to-end automation sets the groundwork for successful DevOps implementation. Organizations need to completely automate the CD and CI pipeline. Simultaneously, they need to identify opportunities for automation throughout functions and processes.

Wrong architecture evaluation

DevOps projects cannot succeed without proper architectural support. DevOps reduces the time it takes to deploy different applications. Even when fully automated, if deployment consumes lots of time, there’s no value in automation.

Thus, DevOps teams must look at the architecture closely and ensure it’s loosely coupled. Why? Because this provides developers with the flexibility and freedom they require to deploy system parts independently and avoid breakage.

No room for flexibility in DevOps processes

Although organizations must comply with core DevOps principles for successful implementation, they must proactively adjust to enterprise demands. So companies need to conduct necessary internal adjustments in internal benchmarking for the main DevOps pillars to stay stable at the time of DevOps implementation.

Instrumenting codebases granularly and increasing the number of partitions offers greater flexibility and gives DevOps teams the power to go back and identify the primary cause of diversion and avoid any failed outcomes.

Keep in mind, however, that every adjustment needs to be done while staying inside the limits defined by the DevOps processes.

Poor DevOps transformation

When processes are not properly aligned across every team, the whole system may crumble. Every team must agree upon the process for DevOps to work. In several instances, executive level alignment is critical to bring everyone onto the same page.

Another reason why many DevOps projects fail is the overreliance on tools. Many businesses buy the latest tool in the market, thinking it will resolve all issues and magically help them attain DevOps. But the truth is, tools hold as much power as their implementation and usage.

So, companies must first define the people and processes involved along with the expected end state goal. After the organization agreement, tools must be chosen and implemented to automate DevOps as designed. The operations and developers must be on the same page.

No connection to business outcomes

Most of the time, IT leaders cannot convey the actual value DevOps creates for the customers of an organization.

The truth is, attempting to wow business leaders with technical jargon about DevOps and agile won’t work without solid results. That’s why many organizations fail at DevOps since the CIOs possessing experience in software fail to understand DevOps and agile jargon.

Thus, when tech leaders talk to senior business people regarding technology practices, they hardly pay attention to the market, or the impact and cost.

Minimal attention paid to organizational changes

Several DevOps projects and initiatives do not make much progress as they emphasize and the best and newest DevOps tools instead of communicating the impact of these processes and tools on an organization.

Convincing people to change can be challenging and DevOps is no different. In most cases, failure occurs due to the inability of people to change and learn.

However, the problem can be resolved by communicating the true value to customers. Leaders need to clearly state that change is underway with or without the participation of the staffers. Also, clear feedback loops throughout the chain of command so that crisper decision-making occurs.

The leadership must bring the people along for the ride and make them understand the importance of the change. Also, they need to assemble teams made up of good people who possess the ability to decide the next course of action.

Restricted scope of collaboration

Every stakeholder in the company must collaboration for DevOps so they develop a well-rounded perspective and address serious issues. However, many DevOps efforts focus only on operations and infrastructure, instead of looking at the bigger picture.

For optimizing customer value in the best way possible, DevOps teams need to involve other stakeholders and groups. The key lies in winning the support of an executive who sees the value that DevOps efforts are capable of delivering to the organization.

Allow this executive to align the incentives of the different groups within the company so that everyone stays on the same page.

Poor environment for DevOps projects testing

In order to implement DevOps successfully, organizations must maintain separation between the production and test environments. But test environments need to resemble the production infrastructure as much as possible.

In the case of DevOps projects, testing needs to begin early on in the development process. For that reason, organizations need to make sure that test environments have been established carefully in separate provider and hosting accounts than the ones being used for production.

If that’s not all, testing teams must also simulate the production environment to the closest possible degree since applications tend to perform differently during production and on the local machines.

Improper metrics for assessing DevOps projects success

Successful DevOps implementation comes with guaranteed faster delivery. But if that acceleration takes place without maintaining the same level of quality, then the DevOps program is nothing but a failure.

If your company wants to deploy DevOps, they need to use the correct metrics for understanding the project success and progress. Thus, it is necessary to take into account the metrics that align throughput success with velocity. When you consider the right set of metrics, be sure to drive intelligent automation decisions at the same time.

DevOps projects: The big picture

An organization that wants to develop, drive, and sustain DevOps success must concentrate on driving not only the collaboration across teams but also focus on the cultural mindset of the teams.