Forging Ahead with DevOps

In our case, the whole business means everything from product innovation to factories, compliance, security production, and support. For example, our latest initiative in the DevOps space is a project called Tick- Tock. Our objective with this project is to instill speed and agility to our overall product development life cycle. We are determined to remove process roadblocks during the acceleration of the entire development timeline while still trying to maintain the quality of our services for our customers. A most impactful outcome of the DevOps transformation is that, as a manufacturing company, the Tick-Tock project will help us make a huge leap towards making the manufacturing process as digital as possible. We’re affectionately taking to heart some of the lessons from ‘The Phoenix Project’ by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. The book is about a fictional manufacturing company called Parts Unlimited that transformed IT from a business-burden to a business-enabler using DevOps. The lessons of the book are ones we know apply well to our digital transformation—the lean manufacturing techniques that were so successful for our factories are the same skills our IT organizations need to unlock radical efficiency while delivering quality and customer impact.

Enabling Competence

Since DevOps needs to be an organization-wide transformation, companies can’t just hire their way to competence. You can’t only buy DevOps people, you need to make them. DevOps teams are created through experience and training. When you bring teams of experts together and enable them to work closely together, each team member begins to gain a little breadth in those other areas—in ways that never happened when teams were part of separate silos. It’s also important as an IT organization to continue to invest in the depth skills for individual contributors. Too many IT organizations have taken their training budgets to bare bones, but investing in your people is one of the best ROIs for a DevOps transformation.

Bureaucracy Busting

From a CIO perspective, in a company of any size, there will be teams that perform at different levels. Most companies have a spectrum from high performers to groups that are less mature. The most recent State of DevOps report put out by Puppet, Splunk and Dr. Nicole Forsgren highlights that high performers are not only doing better than the rest of the industry, they are also accelerating faster. High performing Agile teams desiring to bring more efficiency to software development, was what led to the idea of DevOps as a movement. In much the same way, those great DevOps teams will be the mastermind for the next new innovation. One of the most important functions in leadership is enabling those high performers to clear the roadblocks of bureaucracy that will unlock even higher performance.

Successful transformations have a combination of grassroots success with leadership championship. It will be the high performers who would disrupt and discover the next DevOps innovation. The goal should not be just to build the DevOps team. The goal is to create an organization that is good at innovation and continuous improvement.

Aligning Teams Around the “Why”

Many people in the DevOps industry focus too much on the “how” and not the “why”. With the wrong focus, you limit your employees’ ability to innovate. Align your teams instead to a business outcome, where DevOps is a tool to unlock the radical efficiencies needed to achieve that. Successful teams have a sense of purpose and combined with the three C’s—collaborative, cross-functional, and competent teams, results will follow.

While Digital may be a strategic component to companies in today’s world, DevOps has become the enabler that impacts a company’s strategic plan. As a result, DevOps isn’t just something happening in the CIO shop, it’s a digital trend that everyone in the top-down leadership has taken an interest in. DevOps is vital to building better products in our industries in time for delivery, to drive better quality, and to lower costs. DevOps is the how, it's not the why.