The CIO's Guide to Building a High-Performing DevOps Team

As more and more enterprises shift to DevOps, many of them quickly come to the realization that adopting a more agile approach to application development requires a fundamental change to their organization as a whole.

This is due to the fact that at the heart of DevOps is the idea that developers and operations don’t need to have competing objectives. 

In traditional development, the two wings were often at odds, with developers wanting to push out new features as quickly as possible and operations wanting to ensure infrastructure and services are always as healthy as possible.

DevOps can erase this friction by design, encouraging developers and operations to work collaboratively, share resources, and leverage automation as much as possible.

Perhaps more importantly, adopting DevOps provides speed and flexibility to organizations—two abilities that are arguably more important than ever given how savvy and informed today’s customers are.

Benefits of a high-performing DevOps culture

When done right, DevOps can help you hit the target of lowering your operating costs without sacrificing your ability to innovate. 

Among the gains our clients often see are:

• Deployment of new products and features on demand
• Reduced lead time for changes
• Shortened windows for downtime
• Reduced failure rate
• Flexibility in infrastructure providers

In addition, organizations with strong DevOps cultures in place often see less burnout due to an increased ability to retain talent and the freedom for developers to be more creative.

The makeup of an effective DevOps team

In DevOps, traditional roles are blended together. Instead of having a single team member responsible for operations tasks or configuring workloads, various members of the team begin to take on elements of that role.

Making this melding possible is automation for deploying things into production—taking applications from build to staging and QA with automated procedures.

By eliminating many of the repetitive tasks that traditionally fall under operations, staff normally assigned to those tasks are able to bring their knowledge and talents to development, essentially doubling the amount of human resources you have.

This doubling, combined with automation procedures, allows you to pump more resources into the products and services that actually provide your business with value. It can also dramatically reduce human errors, since projects have more eyes on them throughout the development process.

Put another way, developers and operations become a single pool of talent for you to leverage and automation handles all the boring tasks.

Getting started with DevOps

Creating a DevOps culture is a process and, as with any process, there are likely to be some growing pains. 

However, those growing pains are worth going through since the benefits of effectively adopting DevOps far outweigh the potential disruptions to your organization in the short term.

Remember, in today’s business your customers are increasingly smarter, more technically savvy, and aware of the solutions available. If you want to remain competitive, you’ll need to deliver your products to them on a timeline that matches their expectations.

Building a solid DevOps culture is the way to do just that.

To learn more about DevOps, check out our free resource The Full Guide to Enterprise DevOps.