What Does Receiving Support from Leadership and Stakeholders Look Like?

Establishing a robust DevOps culture necessitates the unwavering backing and active involvement of the leadership within the organization. If these individuals do not wholeheartedly support and commit to the DevOps initiative, there’s a significant chance that it will fail. Undoubtedly, the formation of a culture centered around collaboration and communication is contingent upon effective leadership. Leaders play a pivotal role in fostering an environment where barriers are eliminated and cross-team collaboration is actively encouraged. The leaders of the organization are required to fulfill the role of DevOps evangelists, actively advocating for the principles and advantages of DevOps. They must effectively communicate the rationale behind the implementation of DevOps release management and the potential benefits it holds for all stakeholders involved.

Simultaneously, leadership needs to exercise caution...

Making investments in people and technology that are deftly aligned

It is critical for all business units, including the boardroom and the CEO, to have a strong strategic alignment when it comes to investments in technology, personnel, and decision-making. Achieving a successful DevOps transformation requires that you establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to adequately measure success and foster a more open and honest company. Using data to objectively back up your decisions is the best way to promote a company culture where empowerment, ethics, trust, and patience are all highly valued. As a leader in your organization, you must offer your team autonomy, ownership, and shared responsibility. In addition, you must understand the significance of putting the client first in all of your solutions-oriented initiatives and actively seek out ways to incorporate customer feedback into each decision. All aspects of the organization’s culture, leadership, and procedures should...

Why empowerment, ethics, trust, and patience are 
highly valued

A strong culture is promoted by leadership in every successful firm that prioritizes DevOps release management. These cultures revolve around values such as accountability, continuous learning, teamwork, and experimentation. The culture exerts a powerful influence and typically determines which personnel are hired and which teams they get placed on. There is a prevailing cultural trend in the DevOps world that promotes the idea of achieving significant organizational influence through meaningful work. In these cases, failure is not regarded as a loss, but rather as a progression toward discovering the correct solution.

Notably, the DevOps culture is characterized by a significant presence of patience, trust, ethics, and empowerment, while simultaneously having limited tolerance for waste, inefficient decision-making, and bureaucracy. A fundamental virtue that all leaders must invoke is the cultivation of receptiveness...

Offering the team autonomy, ownership, 
and shared responsibility

DevOps leaders can empower their teams by promoting ownership and fostering teamwork. However, it is crucial to recognize the importance of understanding and maintaining the appropriate degree of intensity for each project. To prevent burnout and animosity, leaders must possess a comprehensive operational awareness of the actual working conditions, their context, and the strategic approach required. A leader must possess the knowledge of when to strategically utilize intense sprints and when to exercise restraint and reallocate resources. In other words, a leader must make intelligent decisions on the utilization of available resources with empathy in mind.

Instilling a sense of autonomy, ownership, and empowerment within the DevOps team is one of the most critical elements that a leader can do to establish an atmosphere that is characterized by trust, respect, and empathy. The members of the team should be...

Making customer feedback the center of every strategy

Feedback loops play a crucial role in facilitating modern delivery. To establish a connection between consumers and DevOps release management, it is prudent that you prioritize user delivery requirements by enhancing and reducing the duration of your feedback loops. Every DevOps process should strive for expedited response times and uninterrupted release cycles that are driven by user demands and usage patterns. The utilization of feedback loops will enhance your data-driven decision-making process, enabling the achievement of unprecedented levels of accuracy and swift adaptation to a wider range of events, factors, and requirements. In the context of such new feedback-loop-empowered analytics, those who are courageous and inquisitive will be the ones to lead the creation of value.

What is a feedback loop?

A fundamental tenet of systems thinking and an integral component of your company’s success requires comprehending...

Summary

This concludes Chapter 10. At this point, you know why empowerment, ethics, trust, and patience are highly valued in a DevOps-centric organization. Additionally, you understand the importance of making investments in people and technology that are deftly aligned. You also understand the importance of offering the team autonomy, ownership, and shared responsibility during your company’s DevOps journey. Finally, you know why it is critical to make customer feedback the center of every strategy in your business.

While there are no universal solutions for every enterprise, executives who prioritize DevOps leverage the necessary organizational changes to reassess structure, staffing, metrics for success, and the allocation of tasks and responsibilities among team members. Even essential verticals such as expertise in business processes, business finance, and emerging roles such as automation engineering, site reliability engineering, process owners, and product managers...

Questions

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter:

1. The establishment of a robust DevOps culture necessitates what?
2. Leadership needs to exercise caution when attempting to implement DevOps solely based on what?
3. What traits are highly valued in any DevOps enterprise?
4. What do the most successful executives offer at a DevOps-centric establishment?
5. What specific skills are often overlooked by technology leaders and engineers alike?
6. In an ideal DevOps establishment, every member of the team is involved in what?
7. To foster a collective sense of responsibility, leadership needs to do what?
8. What is a feedback loop?
9. What kind of feedback should every DevOps leader incorporate into their decision-making?
10. Feedback loops are what separate assumptions about the way a product’s end user might utilize it from what?