A successful DevOps transformation doesn’t happen by accident.
There are many considerations to review and challenges to overcome. But, by following these key steps, you can ensure your company has the strategy and support needed to have your DevOps transformation produces the business outcomes you seek.
Map your current process and identify areas for improvement
Take an inventory of the current state of your development processes. This will help you create strategy for change, identify potential roadblocks or challenges you may encounter and discover areas to improve.
Some of the development process to review are:
- Continuous communication and collaboration
- QA testing
- Application deployments
- Infrastructure
- Monitoring
Define the business goals you want to achieve with DevOps
Create a DevOps roadmap to define how your business goals align with software development and delivery. This document shows the direction of your development efforts and how they fit within the company’s vision, including the various teams participating in delivery. This helps everyone understand overarching objectives and how their work contributes to these goals.
Communicate with your team and stakeholders to get feedback and share results
One of the most important aspects of a successful DevOps transformation is effective communication. This means interacting throughout the process with other decision makers who may be affected by it (DBAs, QA, application performance engineers). By doing this, you get valuable feedback and can share collective progress, solidifying understanding of and long-term support for the transformation.
Train your team on new DevOps tools and processes
Once you have inventoried and identified what’s needed, it’s important to train your team so they understand and can implement new tools and processes.
But, be careful not to inundate teams. Having too many tools can lead to disconnected/siloed teams. In addition to collaboration issues, this can lead to redundant work, stalled information and challenges with workflow and reporting.
Automate tasks to speed up the delivery process
For a DevOps transformation to succeed, it’s crucial to identify and automate as many tasks as possible. This keeps development moving quickly and efficiently, while also reducing the risk of errors or issues. Think of the DevOps puzzle as an internal platform that can ingest more pieces of application and infrastructure processes.
Application processes
- Gating
- Approvals
- Linting
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Continuous deployment
Infrastructure processes
- Repository management
- Monitoring and metrics
- Infrastructure management
- Configuration management
Implement a continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline
A continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline will contribute to agility and speed of the overall development process during a DevOps transformation. It also helps to reduce errors and ensure that code changes are deployed properly.
Monitor performance and make changes to optimize efficiency
It’s important to monitor the progress and results of your DevOps implementation. This will help you identify areas where things are running smoothly, or areas to improve or optimize. If any issues do arise, it’s important to make changes quickly in order to minimize negative impacts on efficiency and productivity.
Overall, leading a successful DevOps transformation requires collaboration, communication and continuous effort. By following the key steps above and focusing on the most important goals, you can provide your team the support and tools they need to succeed.
