One of my favorite things about what we do here at New Signature is seeing companies experience a cultural shift as part of their DevOps journeys. A lot of our tasking can be tactical in nature, adding CI/CD pipelines, automating a test, migrating certain data, etc, but then seeing the ripple effects that those changes can make to the daily life of people we work with is the really exciting part. Overall, for a company to fully adopt DevOps, it requires a cultural shift to support the new way of operating, but I have seen where even implementing small tactical pieces of the puzzle, organizations can start that shift and immediately see the benefits.
Automation helps conserve your more important resource – time
The biggest immediate impact implementing DevOps can have on an organization is saving time. Automation and pipelines can free up individual time to work on more important issues. By automating regression testing and having it run every time a build it’s deployed, it can save QA personnel time to work on the more important testing work, getting feedback to developers earlier, and helping reduce delays. By freeing up people’s time you can shift the focus from putting out fires and being perpetually busy to focusing on adding value and looking forward. Measure what matters. Find out what areas your team is high-performing and low-performing in.
It can create a “one team” feeling and increase communication between developers and operations
At a few places we have worked at there seemed to be a wall between software developers who wrote the code and the ops personnel who deliver that code to the various environments. Incentives for both groups are not always aligned as developers want to deliver quickly, and ops wants to keep things up and running. When the two teams are not integrated it can create delays, blaming between teams, and result in people trying to go around the process to try to avoid painful interactions. When both teams get proper alignment by implementing some DevOps best practices, you can align the goals of the two teams, increasing teamwork and cooperation. The shift can help developers appreciate that the maintenance of a system can be as important as new features and allow ops personnel to have confidence in deployments by being more aligned with the development process.
Encourages continuous improvement
The shift in accountability of the team and creating end-to-end shared responsibility also means that teams must continually adapt to changing circumstances, whether that is incorporating a new technology or shifting product requirements. DevOps culture places a large focus on continuous improvement to optimize performance, cost, and speed of delivery. By having key individuals have additional time through automation, it opens the door for other improvement initiatives. Many times, I have seen where implementing some automation or a single pipeline really gets the teams energized and they start owning implementation and can move faster.
We love getting so see companies succeed, and sometimes it just takes a little push to start a reaction that can have a huge impact. Learn how to implement DevOps best practices with our DevOps Assessment!
