On paper, DevOps looks like a winning strategy: developers and operations, two oft-siloed teams, working in tandem toward a shared goal. But the methodology will stall if the people driving it don’t work together harmoniously.
While it’s important to have the right technical components in place to adopt the model, the human element is crucial to its success, Michael Stahnke, vice president of platform at integration platform CircleCI, said.
“It’s not really a technical problem. It’s about flow, trust and collaboration,” Stahnke said.
According to Stahnke, organizations with learning-focused cultures are often effective at implementing DevOps methodologies.
Similarly, Amir Razmara, CTO and partner at software consultancy Avenue Code, emphasizes an education-first environment in laying the foundation for a solid DevOps strategy.
“Our core culture is based on what we call continuous learning. DevOps methodology is part-technology, which delivers the know-how, and part-cultural mindset to apply this knowledge,” Razmara said.
For Razmara and Stahnke, technical savvy combined with accountability and introspection are key factors that keep their DevOps models dynamic while adding value to their organizations.
How did you implement a DevOps methodology within your tech organization?
This has been more of a continuous journey. When we started the company over a decade ago, we started by applying all of our learnings from past experiences using the Agile methodology. As technology progressed and allowed for more automation, we focused on investing and experimenting more and more to deliver continuous integration. As optimization on the process progressed, so too did the sophistication of the technology. We learned to experiment and fail fast if needed. What we learned from our failures, we applied to the next experiment.
Our core culture is based on what we call continuous learning. DevOps methodology is part-technology — which delivers the know-how — and part-cultural mindset to apply this knowledge. To succeed with this mindset, one has to keep on learning to adjust to new processes and develop with new technologies for optimization.
What are the key characteristics of a strong DevOps culture?
Organizations succeed in building strong cultures when they are focused on solving the challenges at hand, are open to new approaches, are willing to fail fast, learn from past mistakes and improve upon them. For an organization to be successful, it is important to avoid the blame-game culture.
We focus on educating our consultants. We demand curiosity from them and that they yearn to learn all the time. This means providing a culture where they feel free to come up with new ideas for improving things within the company. Our consultants have built several tools that we’ve adopted and are further investing in. Nurture a culture of iterative development. Avoid big-bang deliveries and focus on continuous improvements.
Keep an open mind so that you can learn from everything and adapt for the next iteration.”
What advice do you have for other leaders who want to adopt a DevOps model in their organization?
You must be open to change and be willing to fail. Keep in mind that not every single initiative will be successful. Keep an open mind so that you can learn from everything and adapt for the next iteration. If you have technical expertise within the organization, it’s key to engage that talent early so employees can show how technology can help achieve business goals. This will address any concerns the operation team members may have when you start.
If you don’t have technical expertise in-house, bring it aboard from outside, and ensure that the consultants are great communicators in addition to great technologists. DevOps is an ongoing journey, and there is always room to improve. Be transparent with your team, and secure their engagement early on. In addition to being open-minded, you must also be able to stand up to naysayers. It will be a tightrope balancing act in the beginning, but it will get easier as changes introduce greater efficiency.
How did you go about implementing a DevOps methodology within your tech organization?
Start with the ways teams interact. Is one team always depending on another? Why is that? Are both teams handing off things to each other? If something goes wrong, does the same team always feel the pain of it?
Early on, we saw that development teams would build something. It would work for a while. Eventually, developers would update it, and operations teams would be left holding the bag for why it wasn’t working and how to make it work again. One of the fastest ways to combat that over-the-wall mentality is alignment on pain: If I break it, I should feel that burden. If I know the burden is likely to come to me, I am more invested in validation, testing, architecture, non-functional requirements and making sure it works correctly. Have teams that build things, run things, if you can.
You want to move quickly. You do that with a strong process.”
From your experiences, what are the key characteristics of a strong DevOps culture?
A strong culture prioritizes learning over blame. When things go wrong, do you try to find the root cause? Or do you try to see what you could have been done differently in identifying and mitigating the issues more quickly?
For example, when we had some heinous database contention in a collection, we were up and down a few times over the span of several hours. We thought we’d mitigated our problems, but our priority was ensuring we had the correct tooling to see exactly what was happening should our problems resurface. After the series of incidents was resolved, our after-action work focused on improvement in investigation, response and detection, as opposed to really honing in on exactly which team wasn’t clairvoyant enough to see this problem.
What advice do you have for other leaders who want to adopt a DevOps model in their organization?
It’s not really a technical problem. It’s about flow, trust and collaboration. You want to move quickly. You do that with a strong process. Strong process builds confidence. When you can, automate that confidence-gaining procedure and you’ll have time for what’s next. That’s why automation tools have experienced a rise in uptake in the last decade. The more certain I am that the way something is done is complete and correct, the less I need to manage it, the less I need to modify it and the more time I have for the next set of problems impacting my business. Gain confidence, and do it with automation.
