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January 26, 2015

Laying the groundwork for DevOps adoption

Martin Ashall, UKI CTO at CA Technologies, discusses important, pragmatic, and trainable skills that will help organisations lay solid grounds for DevOps adoption.

By Cbr Rolling Blog

Asking the right questions

Whenever organisations talk about adopting DevOps, the conversations seem to almost immediately focus on culture. After all, DevOps is a marriage of two completely separate modus operandi, so questions of the associated cultural change are an understandable common starting point. Many companies rightly believe that empathy for fellow workers, being flexible and adaptable, being able to appreciate and understand each other’s workflow and habits, as well as building relationships, are all desirable elements of a company culture for organisations seriously considering taking a step into DevOps.

As DevOps heats up, such conversations will gain in relevance. And rightly so – a recent study commissioned by CA Technologies showed that UK companies that have deployed DevOps enjoy significant quantifiable benefits – 23% fewer employees working on developing and deploying software and services, 22% improvement in the quality and performance of deployed applications, and a 22% reduction in time spent fixing and maintaining applications, among others.

However, adopting DevOps won’t help organisations realise those benefits, if they haven’t done some solid ground work. Just like having access to top technologies won’t help turn existing employees into successful DevOps practitioners if they don’t have the skills to use them. A DevOps-friendly company culture is quite often an outcome, rather than an input. Like most transformations, DevOps needs new people, processes and specific technology skills. So while it can be difficult to completely turn around a company’s culture in a short period of time, developing and acquiring certain new skills is a much more attainable task, especially in large and more complex organisations where change can take time.

So how do you prepare your organisation for a DevOps overhaul?

Teaching the skills for success

There are three types of skills that organisations should foster in their employees as soon as they start thinking of investing in DevOps: people, process and technology skills.

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When it comes to people skills, developing communication skills should be one of the top priorities. While it may not come easily to typically introverted IT staff, both written and verbal communications, within and across the organisation, and even with customers, are essential to a strong DevOps approach. An equally important aspect is the need for business alignment. A typical dev or ops practitioner will spend most of his or hers time embedded in the technology of software delivery, rather than the business need that drives it. This is something that DevOps tries to address, so understanding the business strategy, goals and priorities behind the technology is essential for organisations that are looking to develop their DevOps strategies.

Process skills are equally important and should not be overlooked. Agile development makes DevOps much more effective in an organisation so teaching it will give IT staff a mindset informed by agile practices and will help teams work together to improve workflow and delivery. Because DevOps is very much about refining and improving flow as well as encouraging change, learning how to effect change in software processes, organisational structures and teams can also be really valuable in the early stages of DevOps adoption.

Of course, said adoption can only be successful if IT teams are equipped with the right technical knowledge and skills. Coding and scripting skills are much desirable in a DevOps environment, so organisations should encourage and help staff to understand different coding languages as well as teach developers to use script-driven operations tools. IT Automation and training in such areas as Portfolio Management, Version Control, Test Automation and Service Virtualisation, whether through formal training or informal knowledge transfer will also help future DevOps practitioners tackle the end-to-end flow, since so much of DevOps has to do with an automated tool chain. For larger and more complex organisations, workflow mapping can be a key asset, as it allows team members across the organisation to take ownership of the end-to-end process, and start to collaborate on continual improvement.

This is just a short list of some of the most valuable skills needed to push forward the DevOps agenda, but it should give organisations a good starting point for successful and rewarding DevOps adoption and ultimately help the realise them multiple benefits that come with the approach.

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