3 DevOps Practices That Foster Successful Digital Transformations
Taking ownership, welcoming and adapting to changes, and eliminating traditional silos to foster team collaboration
Author Arthur Lankester
November 3rd, 2021
Tools:
Digital transformations aren’t easy. However, they’re necessary for an organisation’s growth and progress. They optimise operations and open up new opportunities for organisations to keep up with new challenges, issues, and requirements.
DevOps describes the collaboration between software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) teams. This framework eliminates traditional silos that limit collaboration, transparency, productivity, and communication. By adopting a DevOps culture in your workplace, you’re essentially changing your organisation’s practices and how you approach shared goals and objectives.
What roles does DevOps play in ushering in true digital transformation? What DevOps practices can you integrate into workflows?
Unlocking Success with DevOps Practices
Digital transformation leverages technology in such a way that it opens up new opportunities for societies, organisations, and governments, allowing them to adapt to changes. This consequently equips them to create value-adding solutions applicable to the new digital economy.
To gain a competitive edge in the digital economy, companies must be capable of managing software development rapidly, without compromising quality and reliability.
However, success in digital transformation is elusive. According to McKinsey, less than 30% of organisations achieve success despite embracing digital transformation. This includes industries that are considered ‘digitally savvy,’ like media and telecom. In traditional industries, success rates fall between 4% and 11%. Moreover, only 16% of respondents can attest to the improved performance and long-term sustainability that digital transformations bring.
Why is success elusive? The research found that there are three key success factors for digital transformation.
DevOps Practices to Adopt for Optimal Digital Transformation
1. Empowering workforce to change the way they work
DevOps paves the way for improved team communication and collaboration, resulting in more productivity and quicker delivery of products and results. While its goals and values share similarities with the Agile methodology, DevOps primarily focuses on developing a more holistic team culture, with an emphasis on collective ownership and alignment of values and goals. It involves incorporating software development tools, practices, and philosophies for increased collaboration between developers and IT operations.
2. Building necessary capabilities for future workforce
DevOps enables collaboration between cultural and procedural practices. It aims to streamline operations, decrease the cost of software development throughout its lifecycle, and boost productivity.
There is one key characteristic that makes a DevOps team stand out and succeed: a sound set of skills and competencies. This is one of the factors that propel a DevOps team to become successful. According to the Develop Agile Skills Association (DASA), the DevOps Competence Model describes the essential skills needed in a DevOps team and defines four skill areas:
- Courage
- Teambuilding
- Leadership
- Continuous improvement
And eight knowledge areas:
- Business value optimisation
- Business analysis
- Architecture and design
- Programming
- Continuous delivery
- Test specification
- Infrastructure engineering
- Security, risk, and compliance
3. Implementing the right leadership
Having the right leadership approach can effect significant change within organisations.
When planning to embrace digital transformation through DevOps, you must clearly establish the changes that need to be made concerning your culture, processes, and approaches. As a transformation-specific leader, you need to encourage your workforce to disrupt traditional silo-based methods. You’re also tasked to encourage them to come up with and embrace novel ideas and learn from past failures. Finally, you and your managers need to ensure that collaboration is maintained by providing your workforce with tools that foster constant communication and collaboration.
To fully embrace an effective digital transformation, consider these factors:
- Changing the silo mindset into a culture that welcomes collaborative processes
- Implementing relevant metrics to track progress
- Avoiding the trap of the silo culture, which means fully embracing multiskilling, collaborating, aligning goals, procedures, and business objectives, and sharing accountability
- Leveraging and optimising automation
MEET THE AUTHOR
Arthur Lankester
Arthur Lankester is a passionate trainer and coach helping individuals and organisations in developing ‘transformational capabilities’. Simply said, Arthur help’s people to develop skills to go through complex personal or organizational changes’. Arthur is graduated (Msc.) Psychologist and Master of Business Administration.
Embracing True and Successful Digital Transformation
Embracing true digital transformation entails adopting transformational leadership. This involves taking ownership of your work, welcoming and adapting to changes, and eliminating traditional silos to foster improved team collaboration. At Awarego, we offer transformational leadership programmes, modules, and e-learning courses that help transform leaders and employees.
Create a path to future successes and growth. Embrace digital transformation and be ready to meet changing market and business trends.
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