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Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, IT Strategy (30-slide PowerPoint presentation). The key drivers of Information Technology (IT) or Management Information Systems (MIS) value are an organization's IT mindset and its ability to execute. Today’s best practices show that IT value can be maximized when enterprise IT investments are aligned with business goals and IT execution is [read more]
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Deploying DevOps can streamline workflows, improve inter-disciplinary and departmental communication and generally catalyze the process of developing and launching software solutions.
This all sounds appealing, but unless you go about implementing DevOps in the right way, then you could find this an insurmountably frustrating task.
To that end, here are a few of the best practices for DevOps implementation that will let you sidestep common pitfalls, manage teams and embrace the top strategies with ease.
First of all, if you do not have the in-house talent and resources to adopt DevOps effectively then it makes sense to seek outside help from experts in this field.
The assistance provided by the likes of RTS Labs DevOps consulting services can give you a good idea of how to go about implementing DevOps in a way that makes sense for your organization, factoring in your unique needs rather than requiring you to take a cookie cutter approach.
Another important step is to select the tools which will form the foundation of your evolving DevOps strategy, allowing collaboration across different teams and more importantly tracking usage to determine where weaknesses lay so you can take action to address them.
Aside from determining the most appropriate tools for this purpose, which again can be done with the help of an expert consultant if you are unsure, you should also aim to ensure that there is consistency in terms of which tools are used and how they are used. It is no good if you work hard to pinpoint the perfect tools, only to find out that certain teams are using entirely different solutions which are outside of your newly developing ecosystem.
One aspect of DevOps implementation which gets lots of organizations excited is the prospect of automating more key processes, including but not limited to testing.
However, it is also vital to remember that manual processes will invariably be involved in some shape or form, and so when putting DevOps strategies into practice, you must be aware of the metrics that these generate, so that you can glean actionable insights from comparisons made with automated process data points.
Eventually you will be able to move more and more processes over to automated equivalents to manual incumbents, meaning that issues can be pinpointed and dealt with independent of human interactions. Until then, you need to remain vigilant to the ebb and flow of all process types, irrespective of how they are handled.
Development needs to be seen as a continuous cycle, and this certainly applies to the process of feeding back on the results of testing so that responsible team members know not only what is going wrong, but why an issue may have arisen in the first place.
Of course it is not enough to know that this is necessary; you also need to create a logical, efficient plan for orchestrating any communications so that those individuals and systems involved can be harnessed optimally.
Approaching feedback in this way is additionally advantageous because it means that it will be easier to ensure that a consensus is reached when a problem needs to be fixed, because everyone will be on the same page and up to date with the relevant information, rather than some feeling like they are being kept out of the loop.
There is a lot more to successfully implementing DevOps to learn about, but hopefully you can use this as a starting point for your own efforts.
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These best practices are of the same as those leveraged by top-tier management consulting firms, like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and Accenture. Improve the growth and efficiency of your organization by utilizing these best practice frameworks, templates, and tools. Most were developed by seasoned executives and consultants with over 20+ years of experience.
