3 Important Lessons When Supervising DevOps

The cultural philosophy of DevOps requires a paradigm shift in thinking, not just technological processes. The main goal of all the practices that we will look at is to break down the barriers between the development department, managers, and engineers since they usually exist in isolation. This approach previously helped to clearly distribute tasks between groups of performers but excluded interaction as a key factor in high productivity and flexibility.

Well-established communication between all links in the chain of those responsible for the product increases the quality and efficiency of work. Additionally, creative ideas often go beyond the traditional framework, which opens up opportunities for the integration of innovative solutions.

3 DevOps Cultural Changes You Need to Adopt

DevOps is a development philosophy where developers and operators stand shoulder to shoulder in the process of creating, testing and automating a digital product. This is true teamwork with as much technology and process supervision as possible — these are the key factors to consider when implementing DevOps. Understanding how these nuances overlap and interact is important for all stakeholders, especially for product owners and developers. Supervision of your DevOps implementation is successful when you consider three main rules. Let's talk about them in more detail.

1. Set Clear Goals

You cannot count on a high-quality result if goals are blurry and incomprehensible. So, the first thing when implementing a DevOps methodology is to write down target outcomes and prioritize them.

Designed thinking sessions, feature building, and discovery sessions help to determine the key points on the way to the agreed results. During these sessions, the team manages to find the main goals and objectives that need to be solved. Further, it remains only not to confuse outcomes with outputs.

For example, outcomes are when sprints for developers are created chaotically, without reference to the key stages and main functions of the final product. As a result, the team is overloaded by constantly doing something, but there is no way to make a meaningful report and show the results. With this approach, the resource is used irrationally, and the path to the main goal becomes confusing and convoluted.

At the same time, outputs are tangible key results that are recorded in the backlog and received from there for the current work of developers. Sprints are already created on the basis of these important tasks. Every team has a performer and the one who is responsible for it. This ensures that the key tasks and goals are correctly understood and leads the team to a successful project finish much faster with minimal effort.

Set goals correctly, and you will gain resources and time.

2. Create a Safe Environment

Let's talk about team play. In any team working on a single task, it is essential to create a healthy, motivating atmosphere. In this situation, each of those who work on the project not only understands certain tasks but also evaluates their contribution to the product, and this work acquires value. But employee motivation, as well as their understanding of self-worth, depends on having a safe work environment that encourages participants to develop, learn from different situations, and be flexible and even inventive.

A healthy and motivated team is the result of the work of the curator and the leaders of the organization, but the attitude of the team itself is no less important. Use the tools of group regulation, collect feedback, and respond to it adequately and quickly. This way, you show developers the value of both the product they are working on and themselves as the creators of what matters and makes sense.

Special practices will also help you create a healthy and safe work environment:

1. Use retrospectives to quickly and effectively resolve conflicts (read more about this technique in Don't Be Afraid to Lead by Brené Brown).

2. Check coordinates to make sure intermediate results meet expectations for quality and time. This will help to see the dynamics and rejoice in micro-achievements on the way to the global goal.

3. If new inputs appear during the project, set new time limits and discuss changes with the team. This way, you can avoid chaos and turmoil and not miss deadlines.

All these tips together are aimed at scaling the value of employees and the product that the team is working on. This is an approach that works in a “win-win” format and has a good long-term perspective.

3. Structure Your Technology

Your technology already has a specific architecture, but it may exist in isolation from the day-to-day activities of your team members. However, it is important that team members understand the company's technological landscape — it will help the organization grow, evolve, adapt to new market conditions, and innovate to remain competitive.

If you do not have ready-made diagrams or other relevant documentation that clearly demonstrates the structure of the company and individual technologies, create that architecture with your team. You will have to allocate some time for this work, but such an investment will show gaps and problem areas and also identify and highlight potential growth points.

You will see which processes and technologies need to be updated or optimized, learn which tools are already helping in the software product development cycle. As a result, you will speed up the delivery of software by optimizing its life cycle.

These three rules will help to painlessly introduce the DevOps culture into the life of the company and qualitatively change its philosophy.