Last Updated May 22, 2017 — DevOps Expert
Why DevOps May Be Wrong for Your Organization
DevOps
When organizations see that a new methodology, sales channel or technology is doing well for a competitor or in the industry at large, there is often a desire to incorporate this into their own business. After all, if it works for others, why can’t it work for them?
The wide success of agile as a way to improve transparency and delivery is a great example of a better way of working that seemed to be making a real and positive change to organizations that were correctly embracing it. Similarly, the adoption of cloud services as a place to build new, highly scalable solutions was a “no brainer” for organizations looking at what other successful companies were doing. However, not all agile adoption was successful and not all cloud migrations went off without a hitch. Trying to get your legacy, waterfall based organization to be agile overnight was never going to be an easy ride, in much the same way as migrating in-house legacy systems onto a cloud provider comes with a number of practical challenges. With all these popular trends, it pays to research and assess your own readiness to adopt and adapt to the change that is being considered. DevOps is no different. While I’m personally an advocate of the many benefits that DevOps can provide to an organization, there are also scenarios where I think its adoption is likely to be too challenging to offer a practical solution in the short term.Four Examples of Challenging Situations
These four examples highlight areas that would make the implementation of DevOps challenging, often for very understandable reasons. These challenges do not mean that DevOps should be dismissed out of hand. Rather, they help set an expectation of the difficulties that may arise and provide some thinking for how issues might be considered to achieve the best outcomes.Command and Control Organizations
Looking at agile as a starting point, the value of trusting your teams to do their best, goes a long way to achieving the desired outcomes. That doesn’t mean trust in the sense of blind faith, but rather in building trust based off of successful deliveries. As the culture of DevOps is strongly aligned to the values of agile delivery, an organization should have a healthy level of trust in the people who develop and operate their systems if they expect DevOps to be successfully adopted. Ideally, you want your business to benefit from the “group thinking” that comes from clever technical people working together to improve delivery—through automation, baking in quality control and improving time to deliver. It is difficult to achieve this in a traditional top-down environment where a single person (or small group) is responsible for telling everyone else what to do. If this describes your organization, then expect to have some wider challenges and costs in terms of widening the decision making to get the best benefits of DevOps.Thinking that Tools = DevOps
There is no shortage of amazing innovation in the tooling to support DevOps at the moment. From the ways in which code can be deployed, to the ways in which environments can be built and managed, there are dozens of really outstanding technologies to help digital engineers. The key here is that those tools facilitate the implementation of a good DevOps delivery. More important than any tools is a process that starts with the people doing the job. It may be that the tools themselves are a key reason why you were first alerted to DevOps, however, tooling by itself will not give you a DevOps culture. Instead, start with a problem that needs to be solved or a process that can be improved upon. Look at the engineers in the team who are asking these questions and those who are engaging in answering them. Next, try carving out some time for them to research and test their lines of enquiries and see where this goes. It may be that no new tools are required. It can also be that you find something perfect that doesn’t have the hype or marketing budget that other vendors are pushing behind their tools. Promoting collaboration, engagement and feedback loops creates a much better foundation to build your DevOps culture around.
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