Change Agents for DevOps

So far, in this course, you have gained an understanding of DevOps. You explored the basics of DevOps and the philosophies and practices of DevOps and discovered how DevOps supports compliance and security. Let’s look at adopting DevOps. In this step, you will learn how you can encourage your organisation to implement and adopt DevOps practices.

Making the cultural shift to DevOps is difficult. You can be an effective change agent for your organisation to successfully guide this shift by understanding the business problems and connecting the technical measures that will solve them and by tracking metrics to align with suitable business results.

For example, when attempting to convince your business stakeholders to automate deployments, instead of starting the conversation by saying, ‘We want to automate our release pipeline’, try leading with the following:

“By focusing on our deployment speed, we will have a faster time to mitigate issues and faster time to value. Doing this allows us to work in small batches so that we can test for usage and get validated learnings out of every deployment. It’s typical that requirements increase business value about one-third of the time, decrease business value about one-third of the time, and make no difference a third of the time. We want to fail fast on the ineffective two thirds, and do more of the one third that generates improvements. With DevOps, we can work faster to know that we’re developing the right features or pivot if necessary. Ultimately, we can improve and adapt based on being constantly informed by data.”

Drawing the connection between how your organisation performs some action and why has to be first and foremost can help get buy-in. If you are able to tie in the business strategy with technical implementations, you’ll likely be able to overcome most objections to DevOps.

In the next step, we will look at a case study where the Microsoft Developer Division implemented a DevOps practice.