How to Create a DevOps Culture In Your Workplace

Start by getting buy-in from leadership

DevOps culture requires a change in mindset from both development and operations teams. It’s important to have leaders on board to ensure that everyone is ready and willing to put efforts towards the new path.

If you’re an individual contributor or part of the team pushing for a DevOps culture change, it’s wise to present pros and any potential cons to the decision maker(s). Why should the business invest time and resources into this goal?

Here are a few common benefits of introducing a DevOps culture you can start with:

• Faster time to market: DevOps teams can deliver software to market faster because they are able to automate tasks, streamline workflows, and break down silos between development and operations.
• Improved quality: DevOps teams focus on quality throughout the software development lifecycle. This helps to reduce the number of bugs that are released to production.
• Increased reliability: DevOps teams can deliver more reliable software because they are focused on quality throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Reduced costs: DevOps teams can help to reduce costs by automating tasks, optimizing infrastructure usage, and reducing the number of failed deployments.
• Improved customer and employee satisfaction: DevOps teams can improve customer satisfaction by delivering high-quality software quickly and reliably, and by being responsive to customer feedback. Employee and team morale improves when there is productive collaboration and everyone feels that they’re working well together towards the same goal.

If you’re a leader within your organization, understand that DevOps is not just a set of tools and practices; it’s a mindset. Once you’ve decided to take this path, a few ways you can support your team include:

• Encouraging your team members to embrace a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
• Providing them with opportunities to attend conferences, workshops, and training sessions.
• Encouraging the sharing of knowledge and expertise within your organization through lunch-and-learn sessions, internal wikis, or a dedicated Slack channel.

By nurturing a learning environment, you will empower your team to stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices, ultimately enhancing their skills and productivity. Show that you’re committed to the DevOps culture development, and find opportunities for your team to help build it.

Break down silos

One of the key principles of DevOps is the breaking down of silos between different teams, such as development, operations, and QA.

• Take full advantage of cross-functional collaboration. Implement regular communication and knowledge sharing between involved groups. Different teams bring valuable insights and viewpoints that can help tackle challenges in unique ways.
• Set up regular meetings or stand-ups where team members can discuss their progress, challenges, and ideas. Make sure these meetings are valuable by adhering to an agenda and ensuring everyone knows the purpose and discussion points beforehand. Stick to a “fast feedback” process, where decision makers frequently provide approvals or suggestions to keep projects from being stalled.
• Take advantage of project management tools like Jira or Asana. This is especially useful for larger teams, but it’s helpful for just about any organization. Agile practices like PI planning cannot be overlooked as DevOps and agile culture often go hand in hand. Integrating effective PI planning within a DevOps environment enhances team collaboration, streamlining workload alignment, and consistent iterative improvements. Using PI planning software aids in organizing these strategic sessions seamlessly alongside other continuous integration and delivery activities. When there are multiple departments working towards goals, these tools ensure that everyone knows what they’re responsible for and leaders can keep track of progress.

By promoting open lines of communication and solid organization, you’ll create a more cohesive and efficient workflow, eliminating bottlenecks and potential misunderstandings.

Utilize a cloud IaaS test and learning environment

Cloud IaaS can offer a number of benefits for DevOps teams. If you don’t have one already, we recommend investing in a cloud environment for teams to both learn and create within, along with testing new functionality before it goes live.

This brings many advantages for DevOps teams including:

• Support for a wide range of testing frameworks and tools: Cloud IaaS providers offer a wide range of pre-configured testing environments and tools, which can save DevOps teams time and effort. Test code in a variety of different environments and configurations to ensure that it is working as expected.
• Easy integration with CI/CD pipelines: Cloud IaaS environments can be easily integrated with CI/CD pipelines, which can help to automate the testing and deployment process.
• Access to the latest technologies: Cloud IaaS providers offer access to the latest hardware and software technologies, which can help DevOps teams to improve the quality of their testing and learning activities.
• Accessibility: Cloud IaaS environments can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, which makes them ideal for remote and distributed DevOps teams. This can help to improve collaboration and productivity.

For leadership, you may be wondering why shelling out for and maintaining separate cloud IaaS environments is worthwhile. We assure you, it is in many ways! Including:

• Speed and agility: Cloud IaaS environments can be provisioned and scaled on demand, which allows DevOps teams to quickly and easily create and deploy test environments. This can help to accelerate the software development lifecycle and reduce time to market for new products and features.
• Cost savings: Cloud IaaS environments can be more cost-effective than traditional on-premises infrastructure, especially for DevOps teams that need to create and maintain multiple test environments. This is because cloud providers typically charge for resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, so teams only pay for the resources they need when they need them.
• Increased efficiency: Cloud IaaS environments can help DevOps teams to increase their efficiency by automating tasks such as provisioning and configuration. This can free up DevOps engineers to focus on more important tasks, such as developing and testing new features.
• Reduced risk: Cloud IaaS environments can help DevOps teams to reduce the risk of errors and outages by providing a sandbox environment where they can test new changes before deploying them to production.

Create a culture of learning and experimentation

Productive DevOps teams are constantly learning and experimenting with new tools and technologies. This helps them to improve their workflows and deliver software more effectively.

DevOps culture thrives on innovation and experimentation. Teams need to feel comfortable taking calculated risks and exploring new technologies or methodologies.

Leaders should create a safe environment where failure is seen as an opportunity to learn and grow. Foster a blameless culture, where individuals are encouraged to share and analyze their failures openly. By celebrating successes and embracing failures, you’ll inspire your team to think outside the box and constantly push the boundaries of what’s possible.

And don’t forget to measure your results! Have recent changes improved development time or accuracy? Have customer or employee satisfaction scores increased? Create SMART goals and track your progress.

What are SMART goals?

• Specific: Avoid vague wording like “better results”. Use things like percentages and numbers to show exactly what you hope to achieve.
• Measurable: If the goal can’t be measured, it can’t be tracked and improved. Ensure you’re able to track the previous and test results for your goal.
• Achievable: Is this goal actually attainable for the team? Goals should be challenging, but also realistic based on past data and team capabilities.
• Relevant: Will this goal be worthwhile for you to work towards? Is it improving something relevant to your DevOps culture? Avoid vanity metrics that don’t truly have a bearing on your success.
• Time bound: Goals must have a deadline. Look at past work and results to decide on a realistic timeframe.