3 things about DevOps that you need to know

I understand DevOps is all the rage these days, along with Cloud and Big Data. During my vacation, I was talking to a person (at the beach mind you) just to get some validation and challenge my potential thinking about what DevOps really is. The person happen to be working for a large organization and their perception validated my hypothesis. DevOps is just another new kid on the block that is supposed to make IT responsive to Development's needs. I could not help but cringe, but my intent of this conversation was not to educate him about DevOps but rather to learn about what perceptions exist in the marketplace. This person I was talking to is an IT manager at a Fortune 500 company and apparently every vendor they have been talking to talks about DevOps, which has literally made their organization "tone deaf".

"how critical is IT to their organization and do delays in IT projects impact the overall business?" I proceed to ask this person. Since they were on vacation and not playing 20 questions about their work. The person candidly said "It is above my pay grade, IT is important to my organization. I believe it touches every part of the company but I only know this because any time there is a system outage. That is when everyone complains about IT".

At this point we laughed and figure out how we could learn from each other about DevOps. As part of the discussion we agreed on the following the 3 points about DevOps and at the end of the discussion both of us came out wiser.

DevOps is not about Development and Ops, it is about the business

DevOps is not about just improving Development and Operations, they are a part of it but in large, DevOps is about improving Organizations ability to respond faster to changing business models in the industry. It not about getting code faster and getting it deployed faster by operations. So what is about ?

As you can see from the above diagram the first question you should ask is "What is your overall goal to achieve by implementing DevOps?" Does it mean that by Development and Operations working closely together and getting release out faster mean more sales? How will implementing DevOps validate your company's reason of existence ?

If Development and Operations are doing things faster, what are the upstream and downstream consumers of these services (both within and external to the organization) going to react? Which type of client behavior is the business going after by implementing DevOps?

Yes, in the case of DevOps one size does not fit all. Understand the market demand and calibrate you DevOps implementation based on that, because implementing DevOps means touching all aspects of your delivery value chain. Questions you need to ask are as follows:

• How is Product Management Prioritizing the capabilities to deliver ?
• How will Marketing promote the new capability?
• How do we encourage sales to aggressively pursue opportunities that they were shying away from in the past?
• What measurements should I be looking at in order to make sure that the business is profitable?

When implementing DevOps, the last question is the most important.

Data Driven Decision Making

I can't stress how important Data is in order to make DevOps successful. I am also not recommending that people go on Data overload. If you are developing and deploying solutions at regular intervals, you also need to know what capabilities the market is responding to. This is because you want keep doing that the market want so that you can increase more transactions. It is not about compromising on Quality or anything of that nature but is about what the is level of Quality that the market is willing to bear and you need to calibrate your flow of delivery based on the tempo that the market is setting.

How does one know the tempo of the market? Well a simple measure is looking at the average sales cycle for your sales team to sell a product or capability or for that matter looking at the the sales pipeline? Inventory turnover? Other areas you want to look at are

• Customer Services calls
• Forum posts on a feature or capability
• Marketing campaign attribution
• Lead flow

These are just some examples on how the market is reacting to your capability that you are offering and there maybe more avenues to research but you need to figure out which ones are relevant for your business and industry.

If you read some articles you would think that the client base is consuming services at rocket speed as the speed of innovation has increased so fast. Rest assured that the companies that are grabbing the limelight now took several years to get there and they have built that habit, in order to leap frog your competition you need to use the data, build a routine, and focus maniacally on execution, learn, and recalibrate. This is what Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other organizations are doing.

You are not only changing your organizations behavior but also your client's behavior

Just because your organization has found the DevOps mantra, does not mean your client base has bought into it. Which is why it is important to focus on the segments you are going to go after. If you implement DevOps and go after everyone, you are likely going annoy a lot a people. Take a look at what Amazon did with AWS, when AWS first started large enterprises were not the target, it was mostly small and medium sized business that did not have a large budget for IT and AWS fits the bill perfectly. Amazon based on their fulfillment experience worked hard to make sure the experience for this segment of the client was stellar and as more and more started to adopt the new paradigm of delivery, the client behavior changed and grew to become more acceptable at the large enterprise level.

DevOps can sound daunting at first, but what is important is taking that first step. What is the worst thing that can happen? You will learn that there are some processes and policies that need to change in order for the business of your company to thrive. Otherwise the status quo would just cause stagnation. Just look around the industry today and you can see live examples of companies that have stagnated.

After this animated discussion, this person and I changed tracks and focussed on talking about better ways to make sand castles on the beach (both looking at our respective child's creativity and admiring it).... I could not believe that there is so much room for innovation in sand castle building as well. Maybe a blog post for a different day