Adopting a whole new culture viz. DevOps for your organization is not as simple as it sounds, as the process comes with its own hurdles.
When a CIO wants to inculcate DevOps in their pipeline, they have to consider various aspects to make sure they don’t fall into pitfalls. Hiring a single team and utilizing a bunch of modern tools won’t yield the results alone. This mainly happens when your teams and products are not well-aligned with the new operational models.
In the process, organizations tend to make many mistakes, resulting in terrible failure to adopt DevOps.
Let us look at the Top Pitfalls to Avoid when Adopting DevOps:
What is DevOps?
DevOps is not just a concept; instead, it is a combination of processes that streamlines collaboration between your developers and the IT operations team. It is a culture where DevOps seamlessly bridges the gap between the administrators and software developers by automating CI/CD.
But every organization is not apt to jump right into adopting DevOps. You must consider various factors when implementing DevOps to avoid failure in the future.
Top Mistakes to Avoid when Adopting DevOps
1. Lack of Buy-in
DevOps’ adoption requires thorough change across the organizations, including reallocating the entire power and influence, discarding outdated processes, and uprooting old tools.
Change is not easy for any organization. And, lacking buy-in from management, technical or business stakeholders can create a serious bottleneck for the entire process. The finance team might oppose thDevOps’ea due to not quite understanding its necessity, or engineers might not want to embrace new technologies altogether, or technical VPs may not be willing to change their culture of working.
That tells us, opposition to DevOps may come from any department, and not considering this resistance might lead to eventual DevOps failure.
2. Not considering resources and staffing
One must have enough knowledge of their team workloads and their capacity to handle tasks. Forcing teams to adopt DevOps will only create more glitches. The DevOps developer will strategize the plan for you, wherein you need to quantify every team’s workload. Next, you need to formulate the KPIs and monitor them well.
Keep track of every employee’s performance, derive the KPIs, and accordingly arrange the workloads. Prioritize adequate resourcing and staffing to avoid disappointment later on.
3. No preparation for DevOps
Rushing to switch to DevOps with a lack of preparation will only deliver poor-quality results. Organizations are hastily hiring DevOps engineers without evaluating their skill sets. Not just that, other companies are taking up DevOps projects with inexperienced DevOps professionals. All of this results in poor quality work.
Organizations must only adopt DevOps when they’re well prepared with skilled DevOps developers who are well-acknowledged with the complete process.
4. Going too Fast
Many organizations are looking to speed up their manufacturing process, completely overlooking the quality of results. DevOps culture must be adopted while keeping high standards in mind.
No doubt, DevOps development calls for speed, but at the same time, you must not compromise with the quality. Faster speed and high-quality results must go hand in hand.
5. Ignoring the Culture
Success in DevOps adoption highly depends upon cultural reset, which is why you must consider culture first and foremost.
Though modern processes and tools may speed up delivery pipelines, these pipelines are primarily driven via cultural generativity. With the Westrum model, one can evaluate a company’s cultural strength, which is usually divided into three categories. First is a generative culture that is performance-driven and greatly signifies high levels of trust and cooperation. Second, are bureaucratic cultures that heavily depend upon rules and responsibilities. Lastly, there are pathological cultures that characterize low levels of collaboration and are quite power-oriented and fear-driven.
A complete cultural reset is a necessary step to gain success in your DevOps adoption.
6. Choosing technology stacks before reflecting on your own practices
Organizations often take a shortcut method and end up choosing technology stacks and tools built by others. This approach will cause them to forcefully jam their business requirements into others’ methodologies.
Instead, companies must try to formulate and assess their own practices/culture and then select the right set of tools and technology stacks. This will allow them to reflect on their unique problems and find optimal solutions thereby.
Technology stacks must align with your culture and processes and not the other way around.
7. Not knowing the objective behind Adopting DevOps
Whether to enhance your security with DevSecOps, speed up your release cycles, increase operational efficiency or reduce costs, there can be numerous reasons to adopt DevOps.
Knowing exactly why you want to implement DevOps culture in your organization will further streamline the entire journey and help you focus better. Align your IT initiatives around the main objective of DevOps adoption to achieve success.
8. Hiring a single DevOps team or professional to do it all
DevOps is not a mere project or practice; instead, it is a culture that involves all your teams and employees.
One DevOps team or professional cannot single-handedly accomplish the goal. Adopting DevOps requires you to change the processes, culture, and tools altogether used by all departments. Hence, organizations must invest in honing up their existing employees’ skills, so they have the necessary expertise to embrace DevOps processes and tools. You cannot isolate DevOps in a single newly created team.
9. Lack of Agility
Your teams cannot be innovative and agile if there’s too much backlog to go through. DevOps cannot speed up your release cycles if even basic tasks require passing through too many stages, such as getting approval from finance, security, and a bunch of other teams.
The whole process needs to be systematic and autonomous to adopt agile DevOps projects.
10. Ignoring Security
DevOps and security go hand in hand.
Myriads of organizations seem to overlook the importance of security guidelines just because they’re hard to comply with. But, such an approach might end up creating more problems in the delivery pipeline. Initially, developers might get maximized output, only to realize later that the applications are not secure to release.
11. Lack of communication between Business and Technical teams
Business stakeholders must not choose tools and technology stacks that are lacking ample technical viability. In the same way, technical teams must not choose tools that don’t align with the critical business requirements.
Both these teams need to have proper communication and take feedback from each other for seamless software delivery cycles.
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