While DevOps brings numerous benefits to organizations, the journey toward successful implementation is not without its share of challenges. According to the Atlassian DevOps Trends Survey, 85% of organizations encounter obstacles during the implementation of DevOps. Notably, 37% struggle with a lack of skills among their employees, while 35% face the challenge of adjusting their corporate culture. This statistic visualizes a common pitfall: organizations rush headlong into DevOps without grasping its essence, treating it as a panacea for every challenge they face.
In this blog post, we explore five concealed challenges that organizations commonly face when adopting DevOps. From cultural shifts and skill gaps to tooling complexities, we will delve into each challenge, highlighting the motive behind it and offering practical advice to overcome them.
Vision Gap
Motive Behind
A lack of clear vision arises when there exists a disconnect between the expectations surrounding DevOps and its actual delivery. Insufficient consideration of business outcomes at the outset can hinder goal alignment, strategic direction, consistent decision-making, innovation, and the ability to measure success. The absence of shared vision leaves teams struggling to work towards common objectives, which results in conflicts and impeding progress. In such an environment, defining meaningful metrics to measure progress and effectively demonstrate the value of DevOps initiatives becomes a daunting task.
How to Overcome
DevOps is not just about merging Development and IT Operations but rather bringing all stakeholders together – QA, business folks, product managers, marketing, and even customers through the feedback they give. Therefore, to implement DevOps effectively, everyone has to be on board.
Organizations’ leaders must ensure that their teams fully grasp the essence and benefits of DevOps before rolling it out. Setting expectations, defining objectives, and championing collaboration through periodic meetings, workshops, and cross-functional training can establish mutual understanding.
The DASA DevOps Fundamentals program stands as a robust example of the transformative power cross-functional training carries. This certification is embedded with practices and methods for embracing an experimental and dynamic learning approach. Incorporating this certification can solidify the base for an enterprise’s DevOps transformation.
Executing a top-down approach
Motive behind
The development team possesses valuable insights and expertise related to the day-to-day challenges they face. They have a deep understanding of the technical complexities, dependencies, and limitations of the projects they work on. Yet, in the traditional approach to software development, tool and platform decisions reside with the upper management or Architecture teams. This exclusion of the actual developers can cause a gap between chosen tools and the existing needs of a team. If management or architects disregard their input and exclude developers from the decision-making process, they may encounter a significant lack of ownership among the team regarding the chosen tools and platforms.
How to Overcome
DevOps advocates for a shift in the decision-making process regarding tools and platforms by involving team members in the selection process. We need to carefully empower team members to serve on the evaluation board. Giving “empowered” team members the autonomy to decide the tools and platforms that align with their expertise and business outcomes ensures that they have a sense of ownership and influence over the tools they use. This autonomy fosters a culture of innovation and boosts developer advocacy, as developers can experiment with different technologies to find the most suitable ones for their specific tasks.
In large organizations, this empowered evaluation board needs to be effective in understanding and selecting the right ecosystem of DevOps tooling choices as a guide for the rest of the community. This will ensure targeted skills and best practices can be instilled in chosen technology, avoiding tooling proliferations en-mass.
Fear of change
Motive behind
People inherently resist change, and the disruption that comes with adopting DevOps can further put them off. The significant shift in processes and workflows can be particularly challenging for team members who have grown accustomed to working in a specific way. A “big-bang” approach, where DevOps is launched in a single step across an entire organization, carries a serious risk of failure, especially with team resistance.
How to Overcome
With numerous variables, including technology, processes, and culture, a gradual transition to DevOps is essential. Starting small projects can show teams how DevOps can help them in real ways. Additionally, these pilots enable early feedback to inspect and adapt for accelerated adoption of DevOps at an enterprise level. As these initial projects succeed and demonstrate positive outcomes, more teams within the organization will be motivated to embrace DevOps, creating a snowball effect. Simply telling people to change will not be effective; instead, organizations need to present the move to DevOps as a natural evolution of their practices.
Shift to Cross-functional Teams
Motive behind
Moving towards cross-functional teams demands breaking down the isolated silos and distributing knowledge across various roles. As a consequence, people may initially face challenges as they need to adapt to broader responsibilities and let go of their specialized domains. The fear of losing expertise prevents the continuous learning and growth required in this new approach. Cross-functional teams aim to bring together individuals with diverse skill sets, encompassing technical expertise, domain knowledge, and cross-functional competencies. Finding the right balance of these skills for each team is not a small matter.
How to Overcome
Addressing this challenge requires a combination of cultural changes and skill development within the organization. The initial step entails fostering a culture of open communication, trust, transparency, and knowledge sharing among team members. Building upon this foundation, it is crucial to provide opportunities for team members to learn new skills, both technical and non-technical, that are relevant to their roles and the broader DevOps practices.
Every team member needs to be encouraged to gain a basic understanding of other functions within the cross-functional teams, enabling them to contribute beyond their immediate roles. Supporting this journey can be done by leveraging the DASA DevOps certification portfolio, which is specifically designed to cultivate cross-functional teams and nurture professionals with a T-shaped skill set.
Misplaced Focus on tools
Motive behind
It’s easy to get carried away with the allure of flashy new tools in the market, believing that they hold the solution to all problems. Unfortunately, this diversion of attention from the primary priority – people – can prevent the success of DevOps implementation.
While tools certainly play a crucial role in enabling DevOps practices, DevOps is not primarily about the tools themselves. The obsession with tools often stems from the necessity to train your team in their usage and integration with existing systems.
How to Overcome
Throughout the DevOps journey, keeping the team at the forefront of the focus is a must. The team’s skills, collaboration, and adaptability are critical factors when transitioning to DevOps. Also key to DevOps adoption and success is having common and shared team OKRs. Without their ability to come together for a common purpose, embrace the new processes and make use of tools, the transformation will not happen.
Therefore, providing training on the newly implemented processes and tools is a consequential part of the transition. A well-prepared and educated team will not only drive the efficient implementation of DevOps but also become the catalyst for its long-term success. Once a solid foundation is in place, the choice of specific tools that best support the processes should be made.
View Each Facet of DevOps Adoption as a Part of a Bigger Picture
While it may be tempting to channel all our time and energy into a single area, such as automation or tool adoption, the tension will arise in other directions. When organizations solely concentrate on the technical aspects, they overlook the establishing of a culture centered around collaboration and sharing.
To ensure successful DevOps implementation, it is imperative to maintain a holistic perspective. The key lies in recognizing that DevOps is not just a set of tools or a series of automated processes, but a comprehensive approach that encompasses people, processes, and technology to achieve business objectives and key results. Rather than focusing solely on one facet, we should consistently remind ourselves of the larger objective.
Discover DASA Partnership
In the digital era, the choice of a certification program incorporated into an organization’s learning plan directly influences the success of a DevOps transition. The DASA DevOps certification portfolio offers an end-to-end solution, leading businesses towards effective DevOps transformation. As DASA’s Accredited Training Provider, you will gain access to the immense body of knowledge to empower your clients and facilitate their transformation into high-performing digital organizations.
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