How to Use DevOps to Become a High-Performance IT Shop

High-performance IT organizations deploy their services much more frequently and much faster than average shops, thanks in large part to their DevOps practices.

When you apply lean management practices to technology—limiting work in process (WIP); introducing visual displays to monitor quality, productivity and WIP; and monitoring data to help inform decisions—you get results. The culture becomes more generative and performance-oriented; people experience less stress in the workplace; and IT performance improves. The DevOps report shows that both culture and IT performance predict organizational performance, so improvements in these areas lead to better performance outcomes—including higher financial performance—for the entire organization.

A major criticism of DevOps is that it can be applied only to greenfield projects. The 2015 State of DevOps Report shows it doesn’t matter how old or new your systems are; high performance can be achieved if the application is architected with testing and deployment in mind. So if you think you can’t implement DevOps practices because your app runs on a mainframe, think again.

There’s plenty of research linking the presence of women in leadership positions to higher financial performance, stock market performance and hedge fund performance. Unfortunately, the Puppet Labs 2015 State of DevOps Report shows that few teams are truly diverse with regard to gender. Teams wanting to achieve high performance should do their best to recruit and retain more women, and improve diversity in other areas, too.

When it comes to culture, leaders can improve matters by enabling specific DevOps practices and by visibly investing in DevOps. Managers can also facilitate big improvements in IT performance by taking care to make deployments less painful. Finally, IT managers should make performance metrics visible and take pains to align these with organizational goals, and delegate more authority to employees.

When it comes to culture, leaders can improve matters by visibly investing in their employees’ professional development. A couple of examples: Establish a dedicated training budget, make sure people know about it, and give staffers the latitude to choose training that interests them. Also, encourage staff to attend technical conferences at least once a year and summarize what they learned for the entire team.

Just like any industry where the work is high tempo and high consequence, IT is plagued by employee burnout. Managers who want to avert employee burnout should concentrate their attention and efforts on fostering a respectful, supportive work environment that emphasizes learning from failures rather than blaming; communicating a strong sense of purpose; investing in DevOps and employee development; asking employees what causes deployment pain and then fixing those things; and giving employees time and space to experiment and learn. Last but not least, employees must be given the authority to make decisions that affect their work and their jobs.

With traditional methods of software development, deployments are often infrequent, painful and disruptive. In organizations practicing DevOps, deployments are regular, pain-free and dependable. Statistical analysis revealed a high correlation between IT performance and deployment pain: The more painful code deployments are, the lower the IT performance, organizational performance and organizational culture. The data also tells us that painful deployments result in higher change fail rates.