DevOps for CEOs

A Ranger4 ThoughtPaper

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Contents

1.0 Did Someone Say “DevOps”?2.0 The CEO’s Role in a DevOps Project

2.1 What causes resistance?2.2 Leading from the top2.3 Measuring Success

3.0 Getting Started3.1 Things you need to make sure your CIO isn’t doing3.2 Things you need to make sure are happening

4.0 Conclusions

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1.0 Did Someone Say “DevOps”?

Did your CIO say “DevOps” today? Or did you see it in a Gartner paper? Is it just anotherone of those IT buzzwords like eBusiness or SOA or BPM that you’ve seen come and go overthe years? Are you going to be asked to lay some investment down to do some “DevOps”?Chances are in 2014, yes, your business will be asked by IT to invest in DevOps.

Here are the things you need to know.

DevOps is a philosophy designed to resolve conflict between IT and Development teams.

Jeez. Can’t they just get on with their jobs?

Well, no. You see, IT has changed quite a lot over recent years. Where once IT was, formany organisations, a function, often located in the basement, to keep a few internal, notall that heavily used systems running, things have become much more complex.

You may have noticed this in your own business. How have your IT investments andresources changed over the years? Do you now report on how much of your business istransacted through digital channels? Do your marketing team talk to you about your socialand mobile strategies?

Over the years, your IT teams have built ever more complex and integrated architecturesand smarter applications - making your business more competitive, delighting yourcustomers. IT has become your strategic weapon.

So why the conflict? You’re pushing your developers to deliver innovation and that demandschange in the systems. You’re also demanding optimum performance from all of yourapplications - and the best way to keep things stable is not to change them. Therein lies theconflict - one group championing change, another stability.

So what can you do to help? Why would you want to?

Resolving this conflict will help you to:

- Innovate faster- Delight your customers more- Be more competitive- Report greater earnings to your shareholders

But how?

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2.0 The CEO’s Role in a DevOps Project

A DevOps initiative drives change and you’ll probably know from experience that drivingchange is hard. It can be painful, there may be pockets of resistance, and mistakes may bemade.

Here are some key tenets of DevOps philosophy that you might find useful to rememberduring your DevOps project:

- Change is essential for improvement- Failure is essential for learning- Blame has only a negative effect- Collaboration is key

2.1 What causes resistance?

People fear change because they fear for their jobs. Although DevOps is a philosophy forcultural movement, its ultimate goal is often something called Continuous Delivery -optimising the software delivery pipeline through automation. And people have alwaysfeared automation because it does the jobs they are used to doing.

You might find (and if you have time, we highly recommend you read the DevOps novel,‘The Phoenix Project’ by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford) that you have keymembers of staff who hold all the knowledge around certain processes and, whilst they areoften held up as heroes during IT disasters, actually they are bottlenecks. And they like theirpositions of safety and indispensability. Knowledge is power, after all.

The thing is, these people are often amongst your most talented. In fact, your whole ITdepartment is full of highly trained, super-capable and often very creative people. Freeingthem up from mundane, error-prone tasks and making massive reductions in the time theyspend troubleshooting and fixing problems allows them to have and act on more ideas. Moreinnovation for you. And less disasters, less embarrassment and less explanations to theshareholders and press.

It’s your job to make resistance futile. The future of your business may depend on it.

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2.2 Leading from the top

So in order to combat the resistance, your DevOps stakeholders and evangelists need yoursupport. They need you to mandate their project and make sure that everyone in thecompany understands its importance and is fully engaged to make sure it’s a success.

It’s also worth mentioning that although the term DevOps refers to your IT Developmentand Operations teams, there are other roles in your IT department that need to be involvedtoo - your technical architects, information security people, testers and QA experts. Andnot only them - your business analysts too as they will be the conduits of your system andapplication requirements. And also your lines of business as these people are the ultimatesource of your business’ innovative ideas - whether it’s your marketing, sales, finance orproduct people, everyone needs to understand that you are implementing a program ofchange that will make your business the best it can be and they all need to be a part ofthat. Everyone’s input is valued.

2.3 Measuring Success

As CEO you’re ultimately responsible for the bottom line, and DevOps is also about cash.When systems are down that often means your business is losing transactions. It meansyou’re losing customers to the competition and damaging your reputation. If you’re notinnovating fast enough, those cool new features, mobile apps or social media fandanglesyour competition are showing off are attracting your customers away from you.

A central tenet of DevOps is metrics. You need to become metric obsessed, if you aren’talready, and push the love of stats through your whole organisation. If your CIO isn’tbaselining your position at the start of your DevOps project, you should ask that they do.

Ask them for metrics for:

- The volume and frequency of application releases- The number of software defects/bugs over time and time spent troubleshooting- Frequency and length of application outages (and cost to the business where possible)- Current infrastructure costs in pre-production and production (hardware and software)

Those metrics are all technology based, so why not try for some softer, culture-basedmetrics around customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction?

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3.0 Getting Started

Hopefully your CIO has come to you with a proposed plan. We recommend starting with apiece of consulting to review and measure (baseline) the current state. We believe it’shelpful to have a third party to perform this piece of work because:

- You can choose a team of experienced DevOps experts to work with your teams - theexperts in your business- Often companies find it difficult to find the time to save time. Sometimes people are sobusy firefighting they find it impossible to take a step back and plan for change- Humans are emotional and political and sometimes it helps to have a non-invested thirdparty take a look - you might find you are told little you don’t already know butpragmatically delivered observations can carry more credence- You might want some help visualising your desired future state from people that havetaken other organisations there already- You’ll need a fit assessment of proposed projects and some technology recommendationsfrom people that know the market and have experience implementing proposed tooling

3.1 Things you need to make sure your CIO isn’t doing

- Don’t let them create another silo - i.e. a DevOps team- Hiring DevOps people doesn’t work either- Rushing out and buying tools isn’t a good idea - it’s best to first understand and fix thepeople and process issues- That said, at some point, commitments to automation projects need to be made as this isthe only way you’ll achieve the optimum benefits of reducing your innovation’s time tomarket- Not baselining and producing quantifiable, measurable project targets - how are you goingto report on the payback on your investment without these? How can you congratulate yourteams on their successes without knowing what they are?

3.2 Things you need to make sure are happening

- You receive regular reports on the quantifiable metrics of success to share with the wholecompany- Rewards are given and success is recognised and celebrated- Failures are reported and investigated, without blame, with the intent to improve andlearn- Everyone is being heard- Your people are becoming happier and your customers are delighted

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4.0 Conclusions

DevOps is here and companies worldwide are reporting significant benefits andimprovements through implementing DevOps best practices. Ranger4 are experts in DevOpsand offer a DevOps Maturity Assessment to get organisations started on their DevOpsjourney. We can measure you against our DevOps Maturity Index (DMI) and give you a score- a quantified number that you can aim to improve.

To find out more, visit www.ranger4.com

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