The DevOps Story Needs to Be Told!
There is so much chatter about DevOps these days, but so little clarity about what it really means. The shame of it is that very few of us have really heard the "Story of DevOps." Some don't know the how the story begins...some get lost in the middle of the story...and others are scared of how the story will end.
The outline of any great story includes the Setting, Theme, Characters, Point of View, Plot, Conflict, and Resolution.
- Setting - DevOps needs the right environment...the right mood, to really flourish
- Theme - The big idea that makes DevOps a foundation for successful Agile implementation
- Characters and Point of View - DevOps done right is so much about people
- Plot and Conflict - Transitioning from a silo organization can be a happy story or a disaster
- Resolution - Setting a destination for your DevOps journey is so important
In this blog series, we hope to help you write the “Story of DevOps” at your organization to make DevOps wildly impactful to your business results. Let's start with the setting...
DevOps - The Setting
What is DevOps? At the heart of it, DevOps is an enabler for rapid flow of business ideas to working solutions that make your company money - increase revenues, satisfy customers, or reduce costs. That rapid flow goes straight through your solution delivery teams (Dev) and the folks responsible for making sure those solutions run exceptionally well: Operations (Ops). At most companies, these are most likely two different organizations - for lots of good and not so good reasons. So, how do we get Dev - whom is increasingly under pressure to deliver more faster, better, stronger - to "flow" solutions with Ops - whom feels a "do or die" responsibility for stability of production systems? The first step is for these two organizations to get "into each other's shoes" - have Ops understand and support the need for speed and have Dev understand and support the need for stability.
In true agile environments, our setting is painted with the right cultural elements - Collaboration, Commitment, Continuous Improvement, Continuous Learning, Whole Team Approach, and more.
Are your Dev and Ops teams talking to each other...collaborating, or has there been years of adversarial relationships between these two groups? If you want DevOps to flourish, these two teams need to understand each other's perspectives, needs, and expectations. These two teams need to be committed to bringing the right people, process and tools to continuously improve the speed AND stability of solution delivery. Each of these teams must be curious enough to learn about each others conerns - Dev working to understand how production systems really work, Ops learning how and why Dev can reliably deliver quality and stable systems.
The Setting You Need
Can you envision your Dev and Ops teams working closely together to enable flow? That's the setting for your DevOps story that is critical for the rest of the story come to fruition. So, three things you need to do to create the right setting:
- Get together and collaborate - Flow will never break out if a virtual wall remains between Dev and Ops. The only way to break down this wall is to actually talk to each other and collaborate.
- Recognize the past and move forward - You might need to recognize the tensions between Dev and Ops from the past and use it as a learning opportunity to understand each others' perspectives. Lower your defenses, listen, learn and then move forward.
- Pick at least one common outcome - The collaboration and flow can start if you can find at least one common outcome that helps the company move towards its business goals. This one outcome can be "rally cry" for future collaboration and real results leading to faster, better, stronger flow of solutions.
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