You Don't Need a Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind is Blowing

Bob Dylan once wrote “The times they are a changing”

DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that improves IT's time to market through better communication, collaboration, integration and automation. It is the intersection of development (software engineering), technology operations and quality assurance (QA). DevOps is as much about a different way of thinking as it is a different way of behaving.

Dev-Ops is a solution to a business problem - one that requires faster deployments, more innovation and tighter integration with all stakeholders. It is as much of a visionary shift as it is an opportunity to leverage build-deploy-operate technologies.

Visionary shifts require that an organization

Create a sense of urgency, to stay stagnant is to fall behind the competition.
Form a guiding coalition, get buy in from senior leadership and collaboration with middle management.
Create a vision. Apply agile tenets to the entire service lifecycle, breakdown complex processes into simple modular activities.
Communicate the vision. Use every means at your disposal to transform stakeholders through distribution of information and knowledge.
Empower others to act. Get people to identify those areas of weakness that cause failure and waste.
Plan for and create short term wins. Where possible use tools and automation to eliminate.
Consolidate improvements and produce more change. Consolidation will create new skills and enhanced cooperation.
Institutionalize the change. Begin to measure your successes and advertise your gains.

Instilling a DevOps culture takes time, leadership and commitment. Demonstrated results show that it is certainly worth the effort.

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