The 4 Stages of DevOps Adoption to Maximize Business Success
The business environment is very dynamic today with continuous changes happening in all possible areas including IT, infrastructure, and training. These changes impact the development process because of increased demands from customers with shorter delivery times. This promotes agile practices and is recommended to be included in the process. In between this entire process, the two main teams of the systems need to be integrated and follow an order in collaboration with each other. The tasks of a development team are not over once the deployment has been achieved. They need to be passed on to the production environment along with all recommended changes within appropriate timelines to be able to achieve concrete company goals.
That’s why you need DevOps adoption to be integrated into your organization’s development process.
“The best time to adopt DevOps is when you start developing your product. The best
time is now.” – Peter Hyde (Sr. Director Analyst at Gartner)
Businesses today are either getting started with DevOps adoption into their systems or have applied it on a small scale but find it difficult to scale up to the enterprise-wide implementation. In this write-up, we’ll walk through the four prominent stages of DevOps adoption into your company’s processes step by step.
The Four Stages of DevOps Adoption:
STEP 1: Define DevOps for Your Organization
STEP 2: Enstate a Unified team
STEP 3: Find Your Bottleneck in your system
STEP 4: Connect All Tools And Enable Synchronization
STEP 1: Define DevOps for Your Organization
Bring everyone to the same page – Collaborate
DevOps adoption is much more than pushing codes to production. It involves the most important element in the development, that’s collaboration, Both these departments traditionally worked on an individual basis with a different set of priorities. The development required autonomy to be able to induce changes. Operation on the other hand consistently works towards bringing more stability into its products and processes as a whole. That’s exactly why we need collaboration in these processes. As a strong DevOps initiator, your company should start with collaboration with all the teams involved in your production process. Real-time feedback and communication will allow your teams to make quick changes to an application while maintaining a stable and robust environment.
The idea is to get everyone on the same page as early as possible. This eliminates confusion and chaos to a great extent.
A possible approach that can be used here is value stream mapping. It gets everyone together and understands the problem at hand, and helps identify areas of improvement. It helps clarify the roles of your teammates in the product delivery process and identify potential bottlenecks, friction points, and handoff concerns at the initial stages.
Take baby steps and show persistence
Take one step at a time. Start with a pilot study. Set clear goals for your project and communicate your small achievements with your organization. This will instate trust within your employees that a major step like this can be achieved one day.
Pick one process flow at a time and improve on it. There are a lot of automation options available with DevOps. You need time to incorporate all of them into your systems. This means you require continuous integration followed by constant delivery and eventually continuous deployment. Automation testing is another important process that needs to be incorporated into this system.
Be consistent on the overall approach
DevOps is all about consistency more than automation. You need to keep going.
Agree on DevOps objectives and scope
When talking about DevOps, you need to understand that your processor speed is bound to take a back step for a while. You need to make sure that the organization understands the need to remain patient and align its tasks with the objective of the organization. Your focus as a company should be on discipline, checks, and balances, as being a large-scale company, you would need to consider the legacy systems in comparison to smaller companies that need not worry about these issues at all.
STEP 2: Enstate a Unified Team
Your workforce is the main element directly involved in your DevOps adoption process. Having the right workforce can make or break your team. It is essential to assign responsibilities to those who have the right competency for the tasks at hand. Your people should understand that the tasks are a completely new way of working. Your workforce should be willing to change their working patterns as per the goals of your company.
To make this process easier, you can start by building a required skill setlist before selecting or assigning people to the initiative.
Analyze your people well, check their previous performances, follow their projects and interview their managers to identify the correct person for the roles at hand. Note that in some situations: you will have to hire from outside and some existing employees may never be a fit for this type of initiative.
Build resilient systems
Building resilient systems allows teams in your organization to collaborate better and work together, knowing how to respond to failure. You must remember to scrap non-scalable and traditional change management approaches to tackle failure in your processes.
Create an environment of experimentation and learning
Just like any small-scale organization or startup, larger organizations can also be an environment of experimentation and learning with little care. It enables you to improve and also tread onto untraversed paths, allowing your team to share their learning with stakeholders, both upstream and downstream, in a process. There is no set process for what tools you should acquire first or how should you begin — you make a plan as to where you want to go, experiment, and learn on the go.
Reduce blame culture
One of the key elements to getting rid of silos is to ensure that the reasons behind failure in processes are communicated in a manner that does not involve pointing a gun towards one person. DevOps success depends a lot on people working effectively together as a team, and enterprises need to get rid of negative environments that promote blame culture. The need is to make sure that the teams understand the problem and its solution and not focus on who caused it.
STEP 3: Find Bottlenecks in Your System
Just like continuous integration, identifying bottlenecks is also a diligent process that requires constant attention and support in the DevOps practice. There are a lot of processes involved here. Tracing the entire workflow, automating it from scratch to end, and collecting and consolidating data throughout the process is key. You need to ensure that your flow time is not too long or else your bottleneck will move further upstream.
To avoid bottlenecks try answering these key questions for your organization:
- Are you analyzing the right metrics?
- Have you understood how value flows from top to bottom in your organization’s process?
- Do you have access to real-time metrics across the process?
- Are you able to monitor end-to-end traceability?
- Do you have access to performance reports?
If you are unable to answer the given questions correctly, then your processes need attention. But you can always have transparency in your systems by unifying teams, processes, applications, and data, for improved collaboration, monitoring, tracking, and reporting.
STEP 4: Connect All Tools And Enable Synchronization
There is a strong need to sync tools, scripts, and data for rapid delivery, better collaboration for seamless flow of data across
toolchains within your systems. With the increase in demand for deliveries, teams are under huge pressure to automate the entire
software cycle. Therefore multi-tool integration is the key here. It helps achieve continuous delivery. When all tools collaborate on a project, it enables enterprises to implement DevOps through the life cycle of continuous planning, integration, testing, monitoring, delivery, and feedback.
Once connected to an integrated tool system, developers, testers, and managers get complete visibility of the tool records, their
relationships from within their own tools, and end-to-end traceability through the software delivery lifecycle, including defects. It reduces miscommunication between the Dev and Ops teams to a large extent. It also enables the teams to give real-time updates to customers, therefore improving product performance. Organizations are on the constant lookout for integration methodologies that are scalable, reliable, and easy to maintain, without manual involvement or programming.
Concluding
Proper integration of DevOps and correct implementation of continuous delivery practices have a lot of benefits:
- Reduces time to market
- Enhances the quality of applications
- Value of services
- Reduces development costs
But, these processes require consistency. All the baby steps you will take in your DevOps adoption processes need to be cross-checked revisited. DevOps require process changes that involve the integration of teams within an organization. The best approach here is to get everyone on the same platform and make them work together towards a common goal.
Application integration is to be promoted to ensure continuously delivery and set DevOps initiatives on the right track, saving a
a considerable amount of time and effort, reducing manual execution, monitoring, and reporting during DevOps implementation.
Partnering with companies that follow a diligent DevOps process in their development cycle can ensure your projects are delivered in time without quality being compromised at any stage of your product development. Consult Apptread, the best custom software development company for your next project as we deliver the best in industry digital transformation solutions to our clients.
Schedule a call now for your next development project!