Top 4 Core Values Of a DevOps Team
It’s important to understand the values DevOps could bring to your organization or team
Before we jump into using DevOps in our organization or team, it’s important to understand the values it could bring to the organization or team. I want to take a moment and talk about some of the core DevOps values, some of those things that you have in DevOps.
Trust
Trust is a huge one. This is trust in each other, trust that people and teams will do the right thing. You’ll also see trust, but verify as a principle in DevOps that of course, you trust people. You also have automation and spot checks and things to make sure people are following the process the right way.
Empowerment
Empowerment’s a huge part of DevOps, this idea that teams and individuals are empowered to resolve problems and deliver their service. It doesn’t necessarily mean ownership, because sometimes ownership creates its worn bottlenecks, but instead, it’s about making sure people feel like they can actually control their destiny a bit, and they’re not stuck behind a lot of teams or processes that prevent them from helping the customer and solving problems.
Of course, the mirror piece of that is accountability. I can’t empower people, then not make them accountable. Part of this is the bill that you run at mentality. When you build the service and run the service you’re now accountable for those choices you made. So we empowered you to build a great service and to ship it. Now you’re on the hook. When things go wrong you may get paged. May be up to you to fix that problem. That’s a good way to introduce even more trust within the team because you’re going to make good choices because you’re going to pay for them later.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is the foundation of many of these processes, whether it’s lean manufacturing, whether it’s DevOps. It’s about always learning, always getting better. It’s not trying to find this perfect place, but it’s making sure that you’re always reflecting on what you’re doing and improving that, assuming that everything is kind of an experiment.
It’s always by getting new data, getting new information, and simply getting better. And that’s often done with data-driven decisions. It’s not simply anecdotal, or it’s not just the whim of some sort of leader. Instead, when you’re changing processes or investigating why something failed, it’s about using data, not just emotion. It’s about actually making good decisions based on the information you planned on capturing ahead of time. It’s difficult to improve things that you don’t measure, so it’s about measuring things and having data to back up your choices.
Empathy
Then finally, one of the core aspects of DevOps is empathy, and it’s empathy for the customer, whether that’s an internal team who acts as a customer, colleagues, external-facing folks, partners. Whatever it’s about not doing just what’s best for you, but it’s also about doing the thing that’s going to improve the experience of someone else and understanding where they’re coming from.
Thanks for reading.
