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How to Create a Successful DevOps Team in a Global Enterprise
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How-to-Create-a-Successful-DevOps-Team-in-a-Global-Enterprise

DevOps is not the new black anymore and having a DevOps team has become quite prevalent in all types of organizations from early-stage startups to multinationals to become dynamic and agile. Those who have embraced DevOps transformation or are in the process of adopting it knows well that it is beyond a set of tools and technologies.

“In the past, business success was all about size: The large eat the small. Today, business success is all about speed: The fast eat the slow.” Daniel Burrus, Futurist.

A lot has been said and written about the benefits of adopting DevOps environment; organizations struggle to find their ground when it comes DevOps transformation.If you are reading, we presumed that you are looking to or are in the process of building a successful DevOps team. From our experience of helping organizations in building a devops team and upgrading their practices, Qentelli has a few suggestions on how to build a DevOps team: 

1. Developing DevOps Team Structure emphasizing on Collaboration– Adopting practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery is key in enabling DevOps within organizations. However, organizations cannot adopt these practices without building a DevOps team structure that facilitates these practices and other aspects of DevOps culture. People are resistant to change and thus, laying complete guidelines to undergo change with DevOps is considered very useful. In traditional organizations, development team and Operations team are working in siloed environment, but to sustain in multi-modal IT environment, development and operations team work together and are equally responsible for release cycles, production environments, software maintenance, versioning controls, and providing high-quality codes to operations for deployment.

So what is the ideal DevOps team structure? It obviously varies between companies. It is good for organizations to compare what is working in other organizations of similar size, digital maturity and business model. By comparing the pros and cons of each model and considering Conway’s Law, we can arrive at the ideal DevOps team structure. 

Tip - A successful DevOps team should work on breaking the notion of Developer – who only code and Operations – who only support production to Developer – Who code and help operations to support the application in production and operations – who works parallel with developers to support production need and environment. There are a lot of tools in DevOps that can help devops engineers with Configuration Management, Test-and Build systems, Application Deployment, Collaboration, and Communication and Monitoring.

2. Top-down approach with Continual Improvement – DevOps comes with the benefit of business innovation, reducing time to market, more release cycles or updates in the product development lifecycle. The DevOps culture of Continuous Development with continual improvement will trickle down once there’s an optimal workflow process, team restructuring and reorganizing and have right set of infrastructure and automation tools to move ahead with the agreed development framework by the management or engineering heads.

Tip – DevOps requires CIOs, CTOs, and other C-suite to champion the cause of adoption of DevOps and scaling it up to the enterprise level. A successful DevOps team is the one in which Business people understand first the challenges of Development and Operations working in seclusion with little whereabouts of each other to develop a culture of communication and collaboration to take collective accountability of DevOps success and failures.

3. Embracing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) – With a change in culture, a successful DevOps team also needs essential changes to be made around technology like an automation of pre-production, testing, deployment, and integration. CI/CD lies at the heart of DevOps as they promote working in collaborative and shared manner. Global enterprises embracing DevOps knows the transitional shift they have experienced with developers working in isolation and waiting for months to integrate code, fix bugs, solve code conflicts and wasted time in duplicated efforts. Similarly, software release cycles were slow due to the manual provisioning of production environment leading to delays and errors.

Tip – A successful DevOps team is well-equipped and well trained with the ability to quickly respond to failures, errors and fixing them quickly. Enterprises looking for building a successful devops practices with the ability to embrace CI/CD and continually tweaking processes to scale it to enterprise level to achieve the shared goals need to know right toolkit for their team members, business environment, and business objectives.

DevOps is a work in progress; DevOps Team is the key to success

As per a study by RightScale, cloud-management provider, the percentage of enterprises that have adopted DevOps principles reached 84% in 2017 but the same study shows that just 30% of these enterprises have been able to scale it to company-wide adoption. Enterprises looking for company-wide adoption must learn that DevOps is a work in progress and requires the strategic view of sustaining its usability, objectives, and effectiveness. DevOps is neither best of the industry’s toolkit nor team nor process; it is a shift in how IT teams lead by the DevOps practices work where people come first then the technology. The success of a DevOps team lies in understanding and internalizing this fact. 

At Qentelli, we work with businesses as a partner to drive their DevOps initiatives after having a firm understanding of their business processes, teams and where DevOps fit best for them and their people. We work as an “enablement” team and empower the existing stakeholders to adapt to enhanced roles and responsibilities to drive a successful DevOps implementation. Qentelli has helped setup DevOps Operation Center for many enterprises to continuously evolve their implementations.

To learn and explore more in detail about Qentelli’s AI-driven automated testing solutions and DevOps implementations, please write to us at [email protected]. Our DevOps team will be delighted to engage with you.

About Qentelli

Headquartered in Dallas, TX with global delivery teams in India, Qentelli is an Industry Thought Leader in Quality Engineering, Automated Testing, DevOps Solutions and Continuous Delivery. With high performing engineering teams working in the dedicated Innovation Group, Qentelli brings design thinking to address complex business problems and enables Continuous Delivery across Enterprise IT through automation for its global customers

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