Building a DevOps culture

In my last post I described some of the reasons why organisations fail to implement a successful DevOps methodology. Often there is a misunderstanding of what actually DevOps is but often existing working cultures can be the thing hindering progress.

From webopedia: "DevOps (development and operations) is an enterprise software development phrase used to mean a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations."

Being a consultant I often work in the "space" between different technical roles which gives me an ideal view of how well companies are utilising DevOps practices or sometimes, where they're going wrong.

For me the most crucial part is building strong collaborative working relationships between teams. In the database world this isn't just between developers and DBA's but also any team who in some way interacts with SQL Server. This includes support teams, testers, release and change teams, architects and technical management.

How we seek to build these relationships is pivotal. As I mentioned in the last post, forced collaboration is a common approach that ends up being counter productive. Organisations in their rush to build a DevOps culture can be too rigid in how they look to develop increased inter-team working, often over-formalising and creating very process driven activities. 

Instead organisations should look to encourage rather than dictate and I've seen many successful ways that this achieved, often in a management hands-off style that lets technical teams freely integrate and discuss innovative ways of doing things in much more open forums. When consulting with database professionals we explore common pain points that are shared between teams and how solutions to which are in some way, arrived at by leveraging one another's expertise. 

I say in some way because often the the issue isn't strictly technical but comes down to process instead. Release and change management are great examples of this; developers naturally want to make more and more frequent changes to systems which is against the better nature of traditional DBA's. 

Understanding each others objectives is the first stage of developing a collaborative effort to build upon existing processes (not work around them) to help each other achieve common aims. The word I never use is compromise and it should never feel like that. All involved should feel like they are building solutions together and not feel like that are to required to relinquish something to get there.

This is a common side effect where the approach to DevOps is unbalanced where teams are becoming involved at different stages. Instead organisations must involve all parties as early as possible and avoid maintaining those traditional silos. 

Increased cross functional teams means that teams work much faster together and this effects both development and problem management. One of the obstacles for moving to a platform of more frequent deployment is the risk of introducing much more failure to production systems. Done correctly, a DevOps methodology negates this by increasing the stability of systems and reducing the complexity of releases to environments which in turn makes faults much easier to not just to recognise but also rapidly back out from. 

It sounds like a case of everyone wins and typically I would honestly agree with that statement. A DevOps methodology has benefits for both teams and businesses alike; better employee engagement, much more personal development opportunities, increased productivity, more stable environments, more frequent enhancements and improved response times to defects.   

Issues that are preventing a DevOps methodology from being implemented can be often be resolved from a cultural perspective. A key starting point for organisations is to encourage collaborative relationships early on and for teams/individuals to seize the initiative and start talking about common pain points, desired solutions and building shared knowledge.