What is DevOps?
DevOps combines Development and Operations; it is a set of practices and a cultural change. Its primary objective is to eliminate the main barriers between development and operations teams to improve collaboration and communication.
Traditional operations have two different areas, one responsible for developing the software, and the other for supporting and operating. With this conventional split, the communication between the teams was low. In addition, this traditional model was not dynamic, and because of the evolution of technologies (mainly because of Cloud adoption), the DevOps concept has become vital in companies’ strategies.
For example, if your company has an application, the velocity needed to provide a solution for a technical issue requires more agile and multidisciplinary teams. Imagine that you have an e-commerce business, and your mobile app is not working one day before Black Friday. As a customer of the application provider, you need the technology team to solve the issue fast as you want the application to work without bugs. So, Dev and Ops teams work together to help find the fastest solution.
In the past, the release of an application happened based on months of planning. Today however, applications are updated and changed almost every week, hence speed matters!
If a company does not adopt or consider incorporating elements from the DevOps approach, it cannot survive the following years.
Transform Devops Culture through Understanding your Team’s Competencies and Skills
Starting the DevOps journey requires knowing how your team is technically prepared to perform the tasks. For example:
Do you have people who know automation at an advanced level on your team to implement everything that is needed?
If you need to know the answer, go to the drawing board and create a Team Competency Matrix.
Use this tool to understand who is an expert and who needs to be trained in your team. Seeing the gaps and sharing the result with all members allows for providing explicit action points to improve your team.
The matrix can be composed of different elements; you do not need to be limited to technical details.
Develop DevOps Culture through Measuring
Evaluating the team’s performance is essential for determining what is working and what needs improvement. In addition to the traditional operational KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), bringing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can provide greater clarity for those involved, for example, in the purpose of the changes and in harvesting results more quickly.
Data must be presented to all team members. Only in this way can the team understand how to improve the results. The entire team must be focused on the same goal in digital transformations.
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