Cloud
Data & AI
Experts say that the last year significantly accelerated digital transformation. The pandemic didn’t create the need to transition, but it made it more urgent. The urgency comes from changing customer expectations. This need is fueling the future of development and requires you to rethink and strengthen your DevOps team. Otherwise, you’ll be subject to failing to meet end user demands.
Why do DevOps teams fail?
It’s a broad question with many implications. Failure occurs for several reasons, causing you to miss out on the benefits of a DevOps culture. Those include:
- Not empowering your team
- Siloing DevOps
- Applying tools but forgetting the human-machine connection
- Dismissing burnout
- Setting goals that are too aggressive
- Keeping old IT structures in place
Not Empowering Your DevOps Team
Autonomy is a major point in the DevOps structures. So is a collaborative, shared responsibility model. If these aspects aren’t thriving due to barriers or constraints, you need to find out why so you can eliminate them. DevOps teams don’t need micromanagers. These professionals have specialized experience and expertise. They deserve to be trusted, not marginalized.
Siloing DevOps from the Enterprise
The work in a DevOps environment isn’t a department. It’s not in some silo. Yet, many companies manage it this way, and it’s not the most conducive to success. It’s an interoperation that should focus on the workflows and processes that DevOps brings to the table.
Successful companies don’t put DevOps in a corner. Rather, the DevOps culture permeates through the entire enterprise. When your team is aware of business objectives and the mission ahead, you can achieve more.
Applying Tools Incorrectly
Automation is a big deal in DevOps, but you can’t just insert it without purpose or human guidance. Instead, foster collaboration on tool deployment and use. Make sure everyone’s on the same page. It’s not the tool itself that causes failures; it’s how people apply them. A strategic approach to this will ensure consistent and accurate application.
Dismissing Burnout
You can’t expect your DevOps team to work 12-hour days over and over. It’s not sustainable. Burnout is a real concern in technology jobs, especially now with rapid change and deployment. A survey by professional network Blind found 68 percent feel more burned out. Monitoring workloads and ramping up resources is necessary for this situation.
Setting Pie-in-the-Sky Goals
A DevOps team of talented individuals can do innovative things and elevate a company’s digital products. However, your goals should be realistic and reachable.
To ask a team to go from new releases every two weeks to every two days is too much. Gradually increase the deployments in a way that makes sense and is agreeable to the team. Having their input matters.
Being realistic about goals makes them more attainable, and natural shifts in how the group operates will be smoother.
Holding onto Traditional IT Structures
There’s a reason your organization is implementing DevOps. You have to commit to it, so holding onto IT in a vacuum of an old model will only cause delays and problems. To fully pivot to this new way of software development, the past shouldn’t be looming around to cause chaos and foster confusion.
How can you turn possible failures into opportunities?
Every past failure is a chance to learn and grow. If the “failures” above rang true for your challenges, it’s time to turn them into opportunities. To do this, you need a consistent approach to living the DevOps values.
- Stay true to DevOps tenets and ensure they aren’t just words. Do this by making DevOps part of the DNA of your organization.
- Encourage collaboration and communication through your processes and group exercises. These exercises can be modern team building where you focus on people skills that will support better communication and collaboration.
- Make DevOps accessible to all to ensure alignment with customer needs and business goals. The framework shouldn’t be secret or overly complex. Transparency across the board will empower your entire team.
- Pursue incremental change in goal setting. Remember to consider workloads and get input from employees. Determining goals should include the entire team, not just leadership.
- Eradicate the environment of old mindsets. It’s time to do a “clean sweep” on the cobwebs of previous patterns.
- Add to your team purposefully to ensure you have the resources to open bandwidth. Expanding your team will likely be a necessity to keep up with new customer demands. When you do this, be very targeted in the type of professionals that will bring the most value and be a good fit.
Build a DevOps team to meet customer needs.
Failure is a part of any process, including DevOps. To have no failures would be quite an anomaly. The key is to learn from those mistakes and implement new practices to avoid them. Keep in mind that growth and change aren’t easy, and for it to be successful requires openness and honesty.
Finally, as you move past failures, you’ll want to keep building your team. That can be its own challenge since most professionals in the space are passive candidates. To ensure you do it as strategically as possible, rely on the experts at Harrison Clarke to help you. Contact us today to learn about our niche DevOps team recruiting experts.
