How to transition your team to a DevOps culture: The guide to success

Does your company stick to a traditional development model? Then you’ve probably already faced the shortcomings of the siloed work of different departments. When development and operations are isolated from each other, it may provoke some problems with timing and quality of work, as well as other issues.

What is the perfect solution for this? The answer is easy: transition to DevOps culture! This is a workflow model in which all teams collaborate closely with each other. This operating principle provides for advanced organization of communication between departments, quick feedback, shared responsibility, as well as automation of some processes.

If you would like to upgrade your workflow to a higher level, this article is just what you need. From it, you will find out why DevOps culture is beneficial and how to switch to it step by step.

DevOps benefits: 7 reasons why it is worthy

In 2022, this software development pattern took the leading position among all workflow patterns. 47% of companies choose this very model as the best-fitting option for them. Why is it so popular? Here are 7 main reasons for its widespread use:

• Improving cross-team collaboration and communication. Uncoordinated actions between departments lead to inaccuracies, errors, and delays. To avoid this, it is necessary to organize high-quality and fast interaction between development and operation departments. This culture will help you overcome these issues, as cross-team collaboration is one of its main principles.
• Boosting productivity and uplifting team spirit. The sense of community and shared responsibility help to raise the staff's motivation. Working closely together, they support each other on the thorny path to developing the best possible product. And each employee feels his/her importance to the overall company strategy.
• Intensifying flexibility. This model involves developing and updating products in many iterations. At each stage, features are tested, and any bugs are fixed if necessary. The multi-iteration approach allows for revisions and adjustments to be made at any stage with minimal budget and timing shifts.
• Optimizing deployment processes. This workflow model provides for the automation of product deployment. This entails the following benefits, described below.
• Fastening time-to-market. This methodology has continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) as the main components. Companies that follow this model do their best to maximally automate the processes that code goes through on its way from developer to user. Continuous delivery of code to production and its ongoing testing make it possible to reach the market as soon as possible. On average, companies notice time-to-market shortening by 21%.
• Eliminating risks of errors. Quality communication between departments, as well as automating the chain of processes that code goes through from developer to user, allows for minimizing mistakes. This helps to make development even more high-quality and faster because less time is spent on possible error fixes.
• Upgrading software quality and reliability. Close interaction between developers and operations managers helps to avoid bugs and identify the few that do occasionally occur early on. In addition, test automation ensures high code quality and reliability.

These advantages are particularly evident when outsourcing a DevOps team. Additionally, with this approach, the benefits described above are complemented by budget and time savings as the company does not have to look for qualified talent in this area.

How to switch your team to DevOps: Step-by-step instructions

More and more businesses are deciding to integrate this methodology into their workflow. The global DevOps market made up 11.5 billion dollars as of 2023 and is expected to grow to 66 billion by 2033. If you want to make your company one of those that have successfully transitioned to this model, read further, and get a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Step 1: Conduct an assessment and planning

Switching to a different culture is a responsible and complex path. Such drastic changes should not be made impulsively. You need to plan everything carefully before taking decisive action.

To know clearly which direction to take, do the following first:

• Determine the current state of your staff: What departments do you have, what employees with what skills there are in them, and how communication takes place within and between departments.
• Figure out exactly what goals you want to accomplish with the help of transition to this workflow pattern. The objectives should be measurable and have deadlines. Also, ensure that they are achievable, otherwise they risk remaining in plans.
• Think about what challenges you may face and how it is possible to overcome them. For example, one of the stumbling blocks to transition is finding professionals with the right qualifications and experience. This difficulty can be solved by IT outsourcing.

Step 2: Establish a culture of DevOps throughout the company

It is essential to prepare staff for the switching to the new work model and create an appropriate atmosphere in the team. This can be done in a few basic steps:

• Develop a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility. Set a common company-wide goal. All employees from all departments will work together side by side to achieve it. This will boost team spirit. Also, avoid blaming individual employees for failures or inaccuracies in achieving goals. Share wins and losses with the entire company.
• Encourage open communication and break down silos between teams. Motivate everyone to be honest with each other. Also, be sure that decisions are made transparently and give everyone a chance to make suggestions. Use convenient software to track tasks and communicate effectively between departments. This will allow different departments to understand where they stand on the road to achieving a goal. Also check if all crucial information is available to all departments, rather than being isolated in access only to members of a particular team.
• Organize continuous learning and upskilling. Conduct training for staff on how to work within the new methodology. This will allow them to get used to the innovations faster and be more efficient. Additionally, emphasize the importance of continuous learning, improvement, and professional development. Motivate and support your staff in their professional development.

Step 3: Allocate the budget for necessary tools and automation technologies

To maximize results, you need not only to change the atmosphere in the company and communication structure but also to use some technology to automate, speed up, and improve processes.

Essential tools and automation technologies that will help you establish this culture within the company are:

• Version control software. It is a special tool for controlling and saving code versions. Thanks to it, developers, in case of some mistakes, can easily roll back to the version where the bug did not exist. This system also allows comparing code in different versions to improve further work on it.
• CI/CD pipelines. It is a set of specialized technologies that enable continuous integration and delivery of code. The processes that code goes through from the developer's computer to production are automated to the maximum extent possible. Thanks to special technologies, building, testing, and deploying code require minimal human intervention and, consequently, take much less time. All this allows not only to reduce the time to release but also to add changes and improvements to the product as quickly as possible, if necessary.
• Infrastructure provisioning automation. This methodology makes extensive use of Infrastructure as code (IaC). It involves automating processes of infrastructure preparation (servers, networks, storage). It enables you to create stable test environments promptly. It also reduces inconsistencies that can be a problem when configuring IT infrastructure manually.

All these efforts result in numerous benefits, including:

• speeding up time to market;
• reducing costs;
• becoming more flexible in further adapting a product to market changes;
• making a business more competitive by faster improvements of products.

One of the most vivid real-life examples of taking advantage of the transition to this methodology was performed by Target. This retail giant had set the goal to provide its customers with the most convenient and satisfactory online shopping experience possible.

The company has incorporated some new technologies, such as CI/CD and IaC into its business processes. This has reduced operating spending by 40% through automation and increased sales by 3% through faster adaptation to the market demands.

Step 4: Ensure constant employee development by training staff

Gartner suggests that 75% of attempts to switch to this methodology fail to produce the expected outcomes due to difficulties in training staff and cultural problems within the team during such fundamental changes.

That's why it's important to think out a strategy for training and adapting company employees to work under the new pattern in advance. Each team member must understand the principles of the new methodology. Staff must also be able to deal confidently with the implemented tools to avoid complexities and associated resistance.

Organizing internal and external training before, during, and immediately after the transition to a new methodology will help. Also, encouraging staff in their endeavors to improve their skills in the right areas for the company will be very useful.

Step 5: Track the progress and don't stop improving

To achieve the goals effectively it is important to remember to constantly monitor your progress. It is possible to do this by using such essential metrics as:

• Deployment speed. This rate is the time it took to prepare the ready code for release. It directly reflects the efficiency of your transition to a new development model. By shortening this phase, you can speed up the overall time from the start of work on a product to its release.
• Deployment frequency. This metric shows how many times changes and updates have been made to code and how often it has been done.
• Lead time for changes. This is the overall time it took to create new code: from deciding that it is necessary to release it. The shorter that time is, the better. However, of course, it is worth considering that the time to complete tasks should be reduced without loss in quality.
• Deployment success rate and failed deployment rate. These two important metrics respectively reflect the percentage of successful and unsuccessful code deployment attempts.
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR). This metric reflects the average time it takes to get an application or service back up and running after a failure. The shorter it is, the better because a long period of improper or missing functionality can lead to significant revenue losses.

If the results are not satisfying at some stage, it is essential to remain flexible. Don't be afraid to experiment and continuously improve your processes.

How can your company benefit from outsourcing DevOps services?

Have you already decided to implement this methodology in your company? Then you need to choose from two variants: create an in-house team that has expertise in this model by yourself or ask outsourced specialists for help.

The first variant is associated with numerous complexities, which can be solved by choosing the second option. Now let's take a closer look at the challenges of building an in-house team by yourself and the benefits of resorting to outsourced professionals.

What challenges you can face while creating an in-house team

Building an internal team often comes with the following complexities:

• Lack of skills. Your current employees may have absolutely no experience with this methodology. They may not know how to deal with new technologies or how to communicate with colleagues in a new way. All of this can make the results of switching to a different culture not as good as you might initially supposed. Training staff often takes quite a long time, and may also be associated with the next challenge, discussed below.
• Cultural resistance. Not understanding how to work under the new culture, employees may resist changes. It can be quite difficult to cope with this.
• Resource limits. Building a new, effective team may take a lot of resources, e.g. human resources, time, etc. These constraints make the path of transitioning to a new workflow model very difficult or even impossible.
• Budget shortfall. Finding the right talent, training current employees, and implementing new technology requires significant investment. If a company is not ready to allocate a budget for this, attempts to switch to a new operating model are unlikely to succeed.

How outsourcing solves these difficulties

Turning to outsourced specialists will help you completely avoid the problems listed above. You will not face the lack of necessary skills, as the outsourced team already has extensive experience in this methodology. Cultural resistance, naturally, also has no chance of occurring.

Additionally, you will not experience resource and time constraints as the services are available immediately on demand. As far as the budget is concerned, paying for the services of outsourcing specialists will be cheaper than building an in-house team from scratch.

Additional advantages of IT outsourcing

In addition to resolving the challenges described above, turning to outsourcing DevOps specialists has a number of other benefits, such as:

• High expertise. When you turn to external specialists you get highly qualified professionals with years of experience with this very culture with minimal effort. You don't have to spend a huge amount of time training your current employees.
• Proven cost-effectiveness. You do not need to allocate budget and time to look for in-house specialists with relevant experience and qualifications. You also won't need to implement and customize tools and technologies on your own. All this will save your company's budget considerably.
• Scalability. As your business grows, your systems and applications may need improvements to cope with more information. Outsourcing company experts can efficiently and quickly help customize your systems and applications to achieve this goal.

Devico is always ready to help

Our experienced professionals are always ready to assist you with your DevOps initiatives. We provide the following services:

• Consulting: You can contact us with any questions;
• Choosing and setting up appropriate tools and techniques to embed this methodology;
• Building a team customized for your needs and goals: Talent sourcing, onboarding, training, etc;
• Ongoing and continuous support at any time of day or night.

Our seasoned DevOps engineers with extensive and varied experience are ready to help you boost your business by implementing the best practices. When you collaborate with our professionals, you get:

• Significant shortening of time that it will take before releasing a product or its update;
• Solid cost savings with pre-negotiated prices without hidden fees;
• 24/7 support by high-qualified managers, and other advantages.

Contact us to get a free IT consultation and take the first step to transforming your business by implementing a DevOps culture.

To sum up

DevOps is an advanced software development methodology that provides improved interactions between development and operations departments, as well as automating processes for code deployment and delivery.

The introduction of this workflow model has numerous pros, such as:

• improved productivity;
• increased flexibility;
• significant reduction of time-to-market;
• higher product quality;
• enhanced competitiveness, and much more.

The effectiveness of adopting this methodology is undeniable, but it can be quite difficult to do it. The company may face many complexities, such as qualified staff shortage, cultural resistance, lack of time and money, and so on.

It is a superb idea to resort to outsourced IT specialists to overcome these difficulties and get many other advantages, including high expertise and skills, fast and easy scalability, and significant budget savings. Devico has high-class professionals who are ready to help you with all DevOps initiatives at any stage.