The Three Pillars of a Successful DevOps Culture
Every company faces unique challenges which shape the demands placed on their teams. While troubleshooting and having technical expertise within your teams is essential, setting the right culture will make or break your team performance. Programmers and system administrators need more than a comfortable chair and powerful hardware.
Today’s complex systems mean effective communication can make or break your projects. The challenge is why services such as Slack has revolutionized the way teams collaborate. You can also leverage other tools such as Trello and Github to help improve team workflows.
Providing the right equipment and services is only the start. True success comes from providing a workplace culture which aligns with your staff. By following the tips below, you can begin to help~build a successful DevOps culture.
1. Flexibility is Key
Technology is constantly evolving and today’s hottest trend could become the next FORTRAN over the next few years. In the DevOps and system administration space, it’s not enough to be a specialist. Being able to pick up new skills on the fly and be focused on working efficiently. There are so many variables in the IT space that it’s impossible to write a guide on putting out issues as they occur. Problems also tend to come in batches, meaning your staff need to prioritize their efforts towards the foundations of problems.
For system administrators, some rigidity can be expected. On production environments, procedures should be documented and there should be basic guidelines on assigning maintenance and troubleshooting duties as they come up. To make the process a bit less overwhelming, you could use tools such as ManageEngine AlarmsOne~to automate task escalation and assignments. Even with these points, Sysadmins need to be well versed in the latest technologies. While core job duties might be less chaotic than DevOps, all your teams need to be open to ongoing education to ensure you don’t fall behind the times.
As with most things in life, there needs to be a balance between structure and chaos. Only you can determine the balance which works best for your staff.
2. Improve Communication
As mentioned earlier, effective communication can make or break team performance. As an infographic on Inc.com shows, effective communication starts by getting feedback and suggestions from your staff. A solid work culture is one where input and feedback is encouraged. This not only boosts morale, but it also can help improve problem solving as it enables teams to learn from each other’s experiences. Writing code and documentation is only part of working effectively.
By providing technical teams with basic tips on improving their business writing, you can ensure all project stakeholders – customers, management, internal teams – all are on the same page and know what is needed from them. Although communication isn’t a technical skill like programming, database administration or managing servers, improving this skill typically has an ROI of 30%.
3. Accept and Learn from Failure
It’s not a topic any professional wants to think about, but failure is something which occurs even with top-tier teams. Accepting healthy failure is a trait which comes from the previous tips. In the IT space, teams need to think outside the box. Sometimes the suggestions will work, other times the results won’t be as stellar. You can’t innovate without taking some chances.
Ultimately whenever you’re making any maintenance or troubleshooting decision, you need an all-in-one performance monitoring suite to ensure you’re making informed decisions rather than acting blindly.