By : Liat Palace (Director, Delivery Technology Office Agile/DevOps Coaching Team Lead – Amdocs) & Shirly Ronen Harel (Co-Founder & Agile / DevOps Coach -WeChange)
“DevOps does not just mean the technical practices and
tools to put your code into production with confidence. It is much more than
that. It is an overall approach where the entire organization must acknowledge
the existence of DevOps. Starting from sales and marketing, DevOps must be an
integral part of their processes to be included in every project. It must be
taken seriously. Eventually, when the project is passed on to the next party
taking responsibility of the project, it is essential to have best DevOps practices
in place.”
DevOps practices exist throughout the lifecycle of a
product, from sales to support. They don’t focus on one person or on a
small part of the organization; instead they address the entire production
line, providing end to end value stream cultural change. When an organization adopts
DevOps, this affects different parts of the organization. It is a culture, a
mindset and practices that should be present across the board. It means
removing barriers and building a collaborative culture that affects much more
than just Dev to Ops.
Adopting DevOps is hard. It requires management support, a
company-wide mindset change, and of course coaching.
If DevOps is a culture of collaboration, then we cannot
limit the close collaboration and continuous feedback to development, testing
and operations. We also need to include accounting, marketing, sales and more
in the loop; otherwise the organization will sell and market deliverables that
the Delivery group will not be able to deliver. This would leave us in the same
place we were when Agile was implemented on development only, while testing and
operation were out of the loop. This is good but limited, and we no longer want
any limitations.
If we want to achieve Faster, Cheaper, and Better, this requires
the entire production line to be involved. As an example, the Sales department
cannot enter into a ‘silo’ contract with a customer, while Delivery delivers a small
chunk of working software each sprint. All parties in the organization must be
aligned with the same mindset.
Defining job titles such as “DevOps engineer” and
“Director of DevOps”, and creating DevOps training and certification programs, are
not sufficient. DevOps is a culture; it’s not silos of specific people
developing tools or collaborating among themselves. It means that everyone in
the organization is part of a single approach call DevOps. Everyone is expected
to act according to the principles and values of the DevOps approach.
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