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Establishing a DevOps culture drives many benefits for companies. Your organization can derive technical and business value from this philosophy. Fostering this type of environment is all about continuous improvement. To be successful, you’ll need the right approach and people.
What Is a DevOps Culture?
DevOps isn’t a role; it’s a set of principles. It’s important to make this distinction. Although the word DevOps often modifies a job title such as engineer, it’s not intended to be a catchall for development and operations roles.
When defining a DevOps culture, it’s also vital to understand that it’s a shift away from traditional, siloed approaches. The culture focuses on all parties sharing responsibility for the development, deployment, and maintenance of software. Some fundamentals of the culture include:
- Bringing faster releases to market
- Applying incremental improvements in response to new demands
- Streamlining development processes
- Increasing transparency, communication, and collaboration across development, operations, and the entire enterprise
What Makes a DevOps Culture Successful?
Success in any culture depends on how well you adhere to your principles. Each element necessary for achieving a conducive culture goes back to those fundamentals and your ability to stay true to them.
Consider these specific actions to find success:
- Foster a collaborative environment in which professionals share ideas and collectively solve problems.
- Promote end-to-end accountability and reject silos.
- Commit to continuous improvement, no matter what the situation is.
- Automate as much as possible.
- Cultivate a customer-centric focus to deliver features that satisfy users’ needs.
- Don’t fear failure; learn from it instead.
These principles must be the foundation of the culture, and all roles must embrace them. With this perspective, it’s vital to hire candidates who are believers in the DevOps philosophy.
What Are the Bottlenecks That Threaten DevOps Success?
There will always be bottlenecks to contend with, no matter how devoted you are to DevOps. What’s important is being aware of them so you can do your best to resolve them before they become major obstacles.
The biggest bottleneck of all is probably a dependence on manual testing and deployment. Manual practices impair agility, making it nearly impossible to sustain continuous integration and delivery. Further, it doubles the workload, leading to frustration and missed deadlines. For these reasons, automation should be a priority.
Scaling is another difficulty that can impact agility. If your team has trouble scaling beyond the initial implementation of DevOps methodologies, it puts a damper on your efforts. It’s critical to move beyond this for workflow optimization.
Other bottlenecks that hinder success relate to not being all-in with the DevOps philosophy. Each member of your team has to embrace these principles. It can’t be in name only; it has to be the foundation of every action. Resistance to this is usually connected to a fear of change. A DevOps culture requires a substantial transformation in how your organization develops and improves products.
Further, this welcoming of change must have leadership buy-in. Without it, many will ignore it. Change must start from the top down, so ensure your leadership makes this clear.
What Are the Technical Benefits of a DevOps Culture?
If you can implement the change and counter bottlenecks, you’ll see many technical benefits. These technical advantages are probably central to the reason you want to nurture a DevOps culture. They also deliver business value, allowing you to be competitive.
The most essential technical benefit is the ability to provide continuous software delivery with faster development cycles. You can respond faster to new user needs and keep reinventing your software.
You can also resolve problems faster. With feedback loops, it’s easier to identify any issues and quickly fix them. Although you probably can’t eliminate all of them, there will likely be fewer defects in a DevOps framework.
Technically speaking, DevOps principles allow for greater agility. You can pivot when necessary without suffering setbacks. That’s because of process optimization, another benefit. Your processes will be more efficient, removing wasteful activities from the mix.
What Are the Business Benefits of a DevOps Culture?
Technical benefits are great, but what about the business value of DevOps? Some organizations will probably say this is even more important.
The business benefits include:
- Faster delivery of features, which improves the overall user experience
- Stability in the operating environment, which strengthens reliability, something that’s imperative with modern software
- Better communication and collaboration across the DevOps teams and possibly the entire organization
- More innovation, because your team isn’t saddled with troubleshooting, fixing, and maintaining
- Strategic alignment between IT and business
- Greater productivity across roles
All of these benefits lead to improved revenue and lower costs. Hitting these goals positions your company to grow and evolve.
Build a Strong DevOps Culture with the Right Recruiting Partner
The success of a DevOps culture depends greatly on your team. To find the right candidates, you need the right recruiting partner. At Harrison Clarke, we recruit only for DevOps cultures, including roles such as site reliability engineer (SRE), and commit to finding the right fit for our clients.
Contact us today to start developing your hiring strategy.
