DevOps and hard decisions

Gaining trust

Who gets to push the button?

Mitchell nonetheless understands the objections of IT Operations staff to the DevOps concept.

“For me, DevOps boils down to one word: Trust. Does your Ops team trust you?” he asked.

 “With a waterfall approach, they only ever got to see the software every six months. And they’ve got used to thinking, 'if it’s anything like the last six monthly release, I’m going to make you jump through a lot of hoops'.”

Successful practitioners of the DevOps model recommend that the Ops team be invited into stand-ups and “letting them define some requirements on the developers before the coding even begins.”

“That’s a key way to gain the trust - by inviting them to the table,” Mitchell advised.

Equally, software developers can begin to win trust by asking Ops what repetitive functions they most want to be automated in software.

It is inevitable, however, that Ops staff will respond in one of two predictable ways.

“Some on the operational side will embrace it and say ‘thank God, you’re one of the few guys I’ve ever worked with in Dev that has automated a process for me. I hated that process,” Mitchell said.

Others will try and put up a barrier.

“Once you truly go down the agile path, you realise there has been a lot of damage done in the relationship between software development and IT operations in the past,” Claudia Lajeunesse, head of platform solutions at FIIG Securities said.

Successful DevOps programs require tech leaders to play the part of a counsellor, she said.

“Part of [Ops] not wanting to come to the stand-ups might be because they remember the years of blame – one side blames ‘your crappy code’, the other blames ‘your shitty tin.’ You sit back and realise, this has been really, really painful for these guys. They are sick of being blamed.

“So you need to say to them, ‘How about we all start over? Because we’re not getting the right outcome to the end customer. We’ve had a lot of years of blaming each other for everything. Can’t we just pretend we’re a start-up, can’t we let that go? Neither of us will be successful if we continue this’," she said.

“You need to revisit that damage, rather than just say: ‘We’re doing agile now, get with the program’.”

New skills

As traditional IT roles are automated and Operations responsibilities blur with the software delivery domain, workplace theorists have highlighted the need for staff to develop ‘T-Shaped skills’.

‘T-Shaped skills’ refers to having almost as much adjacent knowledge about other areas of the business (the horizontal line) as depth in your own area of expertise (the vertical line).

Lajeunesse recommended that every effort be made to show staff stuck in siloed Operations roles there are opportunities for learning adjacent skills and future-proofing their career.

Mitchell said IT Operations staff should view DevOps as an opportunity to “focus on the things that add more value,” such as capacity planning, or improving infrastructure monitoring.

“They’re not necessarily out of a job, it’s just a different job,” he said.

Batten said the opportunity for staff to cross-skill is the “sell” that should win all comers to the DevOps idea.

“While some people don’t accept that, others say, ‘yes, I am interested in adjacent expertise’,” he said.

The move to DevOps is an opportunity, said Lajeunesse, to look at the skill sets your organisation might want in the future rather than what has made sense in the past.

“There are people that might be a great technical fit in the organisation today that don’t fit the future organisation, and we have to be comfortable with helping them move on,” she said.

Perversely, in the same breath software delivery executives will tell you of their struggle to help siloed staff reskill or move on, they also report difficulties in recruiting new staff that have the right breadth of skills.

Many have gone to outsourced suppliers, pairing the agile specialists from these organisations with their own teams, only to find that these outsourced suppliers often don’t practice what they preach. DevOps and continuous delivery is simply too new for there to be adequate human resources on the market.

Each cited different approaches to solving this dilemma.

Suncorp found success by recruiting university graduates that weren’t predisposed to a pre-agile way of working.

“We ran an intern program with a university - and the students got to the point where they were doing daily iterations,” Moseley said. “They were pivoting and changing the way they work every day.

“They have come from a culture where it is expected they don’t know anything, where they have to constantly learn and apply their knowledge.”

For Lajeunesse, hiring the right staff for the agile workplace requires the buy-in of the HR department.

“We invited HR into the scrums,” she said. “I wanted them to come and see how we worked so that when they are helping me recruit and do the initial screening, they know what happens daily. I needed HR to have physical knowledge of actually standing with us.”

This assumes, of course, that the organisation has an appetite or budget to hire staff trained in agile. Even if they can be found, the challenge for many a software delivery lead is how to free up budget to afford them. How, if you have no budget to hire, might you bring in an agile coach or an iteration manager?

Ed Cortis, head of software delivery for Bankwest, has found that some of required skills might be available in your own team, just not in a form ready to sprint from the get-go. With a bit of training, somebody with a BA, testing or development background might be ready for the challenge. But you have to create a culture that devours learning.

Bankwest flies in motivational speakers and runs various workshops to encourage that culture of learning and keep existing staff on the right path.

“The thing that I’m most passionate about is the culture of organisations,” Cortis said. “If you haven’t got the people engaged, you’re wasting your time.

“We talk about the tools but culture is the piece we never talk about. Selling the cultural change is enormously hard and very important. There are no tools and vendors to help you with cultural change.

“At Bankwest we have been very deliberate in creating a learning organisation. If we are to embrace digital disruption, we must encourage learning. It’s delighted me to see how much we have changed this place. We’ve found our mojo.”