5 Steps for High-Performing DevOps Culture

DevOps enables us to push decision making to the edges of the organization, driving teams to deliver more quickly.

DevOps also encourages continuous and pervasive testing, allowing teams to do work more safely.

However, an unintended result of DevOps is cross-functional teams working closer together than they’re accustomed to; causing new bottlenecks, challenges, and cultural issues.

DevOps teams must be coordinated and organized.

But how?

Step 1: Develop Trust

• Be open to new ideas• Don’t shoot the messenger

• Fully support and empower the person with the most knowledge of the work to share their perspective with the team at large, including their superiors.

• Take a community approach to solving problems

• Hold “blameless postmortems”

• Make quality, availability, and security everyone’s responsibility (not just one department)

• Treat each individual on the team as valuable

Step 2: Experiment Often

• This is how an organizationlearns, adapts and evolves

“Out-experiment”the competition.

• Build “safe systems” at work, which allow you make changes and deploy code at any time of the day without risking a catastrophic collapse

When experimenting, always wear safety goggles!

Step 3: Maintain Safety

• Detect and correct problems before they get bigger and before a customer isimpacted

Half of good safety is early detection.

• Encourage clear communication on potential issues throughout the entire value stream

Your best detection system is your staff.

Step 4: Encourage Monitoring

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Remember murphy’s law:

Put sufficient monitoring in place to quickly find out what is going wrong, restore service, and resume normal operations.

•Especially customer metrics, so you know exactly what customers are experiencing and howto improve

Follow key performance indicators (KPIs).

• If something does go wrong, figure out how to prevent it from happening again in thefuture

• Or at least enable quicker detection and discovery

Have a culture of relentless improvement.

Step 5: Support a Culture of Learning

Q: What’s more important than daily work?

Q: What’s more important than daily work?

A: The improvement of daily work.

• Discover best practices and implement them

• Turn local discoveries into global improvements

• Make efficient systems even more efficient

In order to have a culture that rewards learning , you must understand that learning comes from failure.

Good leadership doesn’t punish mistakes, but a good leader must identify mistakes andencourage learning from them.

“Failure is an option here.

If things are not failing,

you are not innovating

enough.”

-Elon Musk-

For high-performingDevOps culture, implement these 5 steps throughout your organization.

Key Takeaway:13

5

24

Check out our entire eBook: The Guide to Doing More Faster. Now with IT Control

In this eBook, thought leaders Gene Kim (author and DevOps evangelist), Rajat Bhargava (CEO JumpCloud), Ben Kepes (Forbes contributor), Alan Shimel (DevOps.com Executive Editor) discuss actionable steps for how modern IT teams build decentralization into their organization while maximizing the security that their IT team needs to keep their organization safe.