When it comes to DevOps, there’s a lot of buzz and hype. However, the specific steps you can take to ensure success with your DevOps initiative are often overlooked. In this post, we’ll walk you through five essential tips that will help make sure your organization succeeds in its DevOps transformation.
1. Emphasize experimentation and learning
As a developer, you know the only way to get better is to keep trying different things until something sticks. So when building DevOps for growth, it’s crucial to create an environment where experimentation is welcomed, knowledge sharing happens often, and early adopters can try new things without risk of failure or embarrassment.
For example, let’s say you’re tackling your organization’s Rust crates deployment and dependency resolution process. You can start small by creating a few test cases, then slowly build up to a full-blown rollout. Or you can utilize the Cargo package manager, like the JFrog Cargo Registry, which allows you to quickly deploy and update your dependencies in a consistent and reproducible way.
2. Make sure the culture is right
Culture is the most significant factor in success. To ensure that your company’s culture is right, you must make sure that you hire the right people and then retain them.
- Hire the right people: The first step to building a great company culture is hiring great people. It’s possible that no matter how hard you try, a team of bad hires will hurt your business’ culture. Even if one or two members bring down other employees’ morale and performance levels (which happens often), having a few bad eggs can make any workplace toxic for everyone involved.
- Retain good employees: Once you’ve hired good people into your company’s ranks, keeping them there is equally important—and not just because they’re expensive! Happy employees are likelier to work harder and stick around longer than those who aren’t engaged with their jobs or feel undervalued by management teams.
3. Create a long-term sustainability plan
A long-term sustainability plan is the ultimate goal. You want to grow healthy and manageable without running out of resources or losing your ability to do what you do best. A good place to start when creating this plan: create a business model canvas.
To make sure that growth happens efficiently, you should plan for it before it happens by mapping out all of the resources you need (people and otherwise) beforehand. This way, if growth occurs unexpectedly or suddenly, there will be no surprises waiting on the other side of it—you’ll already have everything anticipated before it even starts happening!
However, many factors are involved when considering how quickly your business can scale up—and some factors may not always go according to plan! In order ‘what if’ cases like these where unexpected changes occur during times when key players leave? How do we keep our momentum going with minimal disruption? This leads us to our next tip.
4. Encourage engineers to think like product owners.
One of the most effective ways to ensure a smooth transition is by encouraging engineers to think like product owners. This approach can be seen as one of the critical benefits of DevOps for growth.
However, there are some challenges with this approach. For example, suppose your organization does not have an established process for transitioning from development to operations or vice versa. In that case, it may be difficult for developers and operations staff members to understand each other’s roles or responsibilities.
To encourage engineers to think like product owners, it may be helpful for them—and those responsible for training them—to become familiar with agile tools such as Jira and Rally that allow for efficient tracking and communication between project teams.
5. Celebrate success and share knowledge.
To help your company grow, you need to share knowledge and celebrate successes. Knowledge sharing can occur internally between team members, externally with other teams in the company, or externally with other companies and organizations. This sharing of information will ensure that everyone has access to the information they need to do their job successfully, which will help your organization grow.
Celebrating success within your team is also crucial because it encourages people who have done well on a project to feel rewarded for their hard work. This sense of reward is important because it makes people want to continue doing good work so their peers or managers can recognize them as valuable contributors to the organization.
Conclusion
The best way to approach DevOps is to think about it as a process. You won’t achieve success overnight, but you can start building your team with the right tools and processes today.