devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Sanjay Gidwani

  • What DevOps Leadership Should Look Like

    What DevOps Leadership Should Look Like

    Implementing DevOps has become a major focus, but the practice’s attempt to provide organizational support and streamline production systems simultaneously leaves developers with no clear hierarchical structure. We know we need DevOps and we know it helps, but we also know that without proper leadership or structure, it can be misunderstood and undervalued. To build a strong collaborative culture, DevOps leadership, like most other leadership roles, requires a different type of skillset—a skillset that isn’t always prioritized in software development. The ability to understand programming languages, to be versatile and be attentive to detail will take a developer far in their career, but once they’re in a management position, what is needed to be an effective DevOps leader?

    First, what does an effective DevOps leader look like? To start, they need to lead. But to lead a DevOps team, it’s important to not only understand development—including reasonable goals and how to accomplish challenging tasks—but a DevOps leader needs to be able to create an environment that fosters collaboration between teams.

    This is why a DevOps culture is a core value for any high-performing DevOps team. This is due to the cross-functional nature of the practice. The stages of the DevOps cycle (plan, build, test, deploy and manage) rely on different teams with different skill sets.

    Build a Culture Of Ownership and Teamwork

    To effectively collaborate, a strong cross-functional culture of ownership, teamwork, intensity and smart application is needed.

    Clarity can transform a team, and it starts with ownership. Ownership is essential for cross-functional DevOps teams to understand their roles and what they are responsible for. In order for clarity to exist, leaders need to provide clear direction and guidance. It is a leader’s responsibility to set realistic goals and offer support. Group trust is built when a team has a common goal and clear roles and responsibilities are identified.

    Ownership is the foundation of teamwork, and with it, team members can see their individual contributions to a project and can celebrate their successes together. This teamwork then breeds collaboration, improved performance and a cohesive dynamic within the team’s culture.

    Lead With Strategic Intensity and Smart Application

    A DevOps leader can empower their team through ownership and teamwork, but we can’t forget the value of knowing the right level of intensity for a project. Leaders need to understand a situation, the context and how to approach it strategically to avoid burnout and bitterness. They must know when to apply intense sprints and when to pull back and move resources—a leader must know how to play smart with the resources they have.

    Use Soft Skills

    People management skills can be overlooked in a lot of leadership positions. For example, we might see it when a startup chooses a CTO or an engineering lead position based on seniority or developer skills without regard for their ability to actually manage people or their desire to be in such a position. Often, the person in charge of a DevOps team is given this role because of their previous development accomplishments, but they lack the necessary soft skills of communication, conflict management and/or teamwork. Using the four principles above can help accelerate the foundation of culture as well as help compensate for a leader’s lack of soft skills

    DevOps leaders need soft skills. Soft skills include the ability to think critically and project manage while having enough emotional intelligence to inspire, motivate and retain a team of smart engineers. Every leader needs to be able to see their team’s strengths and weaknesses, listen and influence and further develop their members to succeed. The challenge for this role is that, to be successful, it takes both technical expertise and soft skills and knowing how to balance the two.

    Unfortunately, soft skills haven’t been prioritized in the training and career development of most software engineers. Only recently have soft skills been seen as a differentiator in the engineer hiring process or seen as a value-add to an organization. For years, technical skills took precedence and we ignored the areas that would take a software engineer to the next level – the soft skills that will lead to leadership. But it’s a bigger problem; employers say most college grads aren’t learning these soft skills in school.

    Remember the Not-so-Secret Sauce

    Soft skills empower a leader to thrive both within a DevOps team and in collaboration with other departments. The ability to work across teams can exponentially improve business operations. A strong DevOps leader can offer solutions and problem solve for internal issues and customer-facing problems. They are able to bring DevOps into new areas of the company in a strategic and effective way. Collaboration requires working with others, seeing the bigger problem, understanding the business goals and using soft skills to get things done.

    It’s the not-so-secret sauce that makes all the difference when running a powerful DevOps team. A culture of collaboration starts with the leader. A leader’s relationship skills can increase the likelihood of bigger budgets, more tools and recognition. DevOps leaders can build a strong team by leveraging the soft skills within themselves and their team members, applying the right level of intensity and encouraging a culture of ownership, teamwork and collaboration. If these things are missing, whether DevOps or another team, the unit will fall apart.

    This is why a DevOps leader needs to take personal ownership and responsibility for the success of their team and see motivating others, setting a standard of operational excellence and representing the DevOps team as an integral part of their role. Luckily, there are resources to learn and exercise these skills so every leader, newly appointed or veteran, can ensure their team can excel.

  • How CIOs Can Measure Digital Transformation ROI

    How CIOs Can Measure Digital Transformation ROI

    To fully grasp how to measure success and gauge progress toward goals in any digital transformation, it’s important to understand the shifting expectations of CIOs who must report these objectives and outcomes. The pandemic has substantially changed the role of the CIO, giving them heftier goals and a shift away from IT.

    Today’s CIO is no longer solely responsible for the IT department. Instead, the expectation is for them to have a greater influence in solving strategic business challenges. CIOs are now held to higher standards and have great responsibilities, with the assumption that they excel at communication and facilitation. Today’s CIO role also includes business planning and monitoring, transformational development, testing and security and compliance.

    Gartner states that, in a technology-driven workplace, 41% of tech producers are within other business units, not in IT. Solutions are being created from those in charge of the bottom line, who make organizational and business decisions. Further, the rise of low-code platforms has accelerated the shift from IT to the business. Finally, as Generation Z moves into the workforce, there will be a significant shift in what this workforce wants and needs to be their most productive and fulfilled. Typically, this generation of workers are masters of autonomy and they strive to impact everything they touch and have greater control over what they handle and take on.

    Within this shifting landscape, it can be difficult to understand how to measure and set goals.

    Acquire the Right Tools and Frameworks

    The first thing CIOs need to provide to this decentralized organization is the right tools and frameworks. These tools, such as value stream delivery platforms (inclusive of CI/CD, testing, artifact management, etc.) coupled with agile frameworks like SAFe provide a consistent method to deliver apps within the organization.

    CIOs need platforms that allow them to visualize, manage and monitor progress on an ongoing basis. While this was largely a manual process before, solutions have vastly improved and, luckily, we no longer need to sit in a room and manually whiteboard progress.

    Leverage Value Stream Management

    This is often new territory for CIOs and can be daunting. CIOs need to be able to protect the organization, facilitate the quality of its solutions and take accountability for the tools being used and sold to its customers. Fortunately, this new power and influence can be managed with value stream management. It is what allows CIOs to keep track and monitor the bottlenecks in the development process. Further, the CIO can provide collaboration tools to help connect users around common processes.

    Value stream management can be a powerful improvement tool for organizations. It can serve as a material and information flow map that helps workers and executives continually view their performance and improvements. “Value” emphasizes that the purpose of the work process can prove the value and worth to the customer, while the term “stream” means that the flow of this value is being measured throughout the process.

    Set Business Goals, Not Just IT Goals

    Digital transformation success for the CIO not only means that technology works, but that it works for the business. That means the goals CIOs set for technology need to meet whatever bottom-line goals are set for the business, too.

    Define KPI objectives that align specifically with the business’ goals and focus on relevant metrics that matter. There are a number of types of metrics that CIOs should consider, but each organization will have to choose which are most relevant to their unique business, industry and their business goals: User engagement, customer experience, reliability, availability, active usage (think: Conversion rates, repeat customers/users, daily active users) are all examples.

    When choosing your metrics, find those that you can accurately benchmark against past performance. A baseline will prove your worth; without it, it’s difficult to understand value gained. Ultimately, the CIO must ensure that these metrics are valuable to everyone, and stakeholder buy-in is critical. Finally, everyone in the organization needs to be on board with these goals and metrics.