Creating your ideal DevOps organization

Well, maybe your organizational structure does not have to change at all. DevOps must start with a cultural change: openness, empathy, and collaboration are values that need to be encouraged. But still, changing your organizational structure may help accelerate this.

Traditionally, developers and operators are often organized into disparate teams or even different departments – organized in teams with people that have similar skill sets and responsibilities. A common change in organizations is changing this structure by pivoting and organizing teams behind a common goal, a single product, or a group of features, for example.

Now, you will need teams with different skill sets and responsibilities, teams most likely with developers and operators. It is important to realize that forcing such a change upon these people may not be the best way forward. Often, it works best to start with changing the culture and encouraging cooperation – then, this organizational change may come about naturally.

Finally, it is important to recognize one anti-pattern at this point. Some companies are trying to implement DevOps by hiring specialized DevOps engineers and positioning them between development and operations, interacting with both. While this, at first, may seem like a good idea, this goes against the DevOps values. If you do this, you are not breaking silos down, but you are adding a third one. You are not decreasing the number of hand-offs, you are most likely increasing them. Also, collaboration between developers and operations is often not enhanced by separating them using another organizational structure, and you may not see any increase in value to your end users at all.

Now that you know what DevOps is and you have a clear understanding of how you can form a DevOps team, it is time to explore how to start achieving your goals.