You’ve decided to join the DevOps transformation movement by creating an environment of continuous improvement, collaboration, automation, and support.
You must be feeling great about yourself and the future of your organization. But you also might be wondering “what are the right methods to follow to make a DevOps transition as seamless as possible?”
You have already made the first best-step – choosing to integrate the practice of operations and development teams coming together in harmony. We at Indellient will guide you through a tough but important process that will impact your success or failure with DevOps. Let’s get started!
DevOps Transformation Step 1 – Plan for Success
In order to plan for success as you move towards CI/CD consider your business objectives:
- What are your current problems that can be solved by DevOps integration?
- What are your short, medium, and long term key success factors?
- What metrics/tools will you use to measure success?
It’s important to consider that moving to a DevOps transformation is unique to each company. Consider your transformation may be different than competitors due to:
- Business Industry
- Work Culture
- Necessary DevOps Tools
Remember, there’s no silver bullet to a lot of these questions, but if you start thinking about what the low hanging fruit in each area is, tackling these challenges may become a bit easier.
Break Down Silos with Cross-Functional Teams
We hear this term a lot. Basically, what this means is having cross-functional teams that will assist in your DevOps transformation. This isn’t always easy, or even practical, but there are concrete steps to take to determine where there is benefit in this cooperation
Before we can break down silos, we need to focus on collaborating better together. In essence, that’s really what the concept of “breaking down silos” is trying to achieve; that and making work more visible to everyone involved is going to be key in any DevOps movement. This, in collaboration with communication, will drive the overall success of the movement.
No one tool is necessarily better or worse for collaboration than another. A simple Excel spreadsheet or Confluence table can be just as effective as JIRA or other collaboration tools, as long as it’s used well and embraced by everyone.
Regardless of what you do, everyone should have access and it should enable collaboration. Everyone should know what tools are used for and how to use them effectively within your organization.
Address The DevOps Skills Gap
Right now, the DevOps space is really hot and good resources aren’t easy to come by, train and retain.
- Are you prepared to build out the team yourself?
- Do you have the budget and organizational resources to do so?
- Are you going to train your internal staff, hire contractors, work with consulting/service providers or some hybrid of the three to get you through part or all of your journey?
At the end of the day, you need to own the overall solution, but there are multiple ways to get there depending on what resources you have at your disposal.
Consider Offloading some DevOps Tools
With more tools becoming available as SaaS offerings, determine if offloading some of the management of these tools makes sense within your organization. Take a look at the TCO required for implementing and maintaining the tools you select, as managing every piece of the DevOps toolchain may not make sense to successfully execute your digital transformation.
Are You Ready for a DevOps Transformation?
While software continues to eat the world at an ever-increasing pace with DevOps, the challenges and struggles of companies implementing DevOps is very real. We all can overcome these challenges by working together, improving our tools, processes, knowledge and training our workforce.
Indellient is a Software Development Company that specializes in Data Analytics, Cloud Development Application, DevOps Services, and Document Process Automation.
2630 Bristol Cir #100 Oakville, On L6H 6Z7
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