What Are the Six Steps Involved in Enterprise DevOps Transformation?

IT is always evolving and pushing businesses and markets to grow with it faster than ever before. For any organization, keeping up with this change is a challenge and necessity for survival. At this point, it is even safe to say that the IT infrastructure and agility is what mainly drives a business' fate in today's market, either to success or failure. While small scale new businesses can adapt to these changes faster and easier, it is a serious challenge to big, established companies.

Further, emerging enterprises move quickly to keep their innovative value in the market intact. They achieve this usually by either accessing cloud-native tech support or even with the traditional IT approach through incorporating automation and continuous delivery models. On the other hand, for an established business, their very structure, their legacy technology, and their work culture, in general, come in the way of agile adaption.

However, specific industry approaches to adapting agility for businesses have proven to make the enterprise transformation successful. It is a long process, requiring rigorous planning and much stepping out of the comfort zone. Professionals need to learn and alter their working ways and invest a fair amount of money and time. It comes with the considerable relief of directing your business the right way, which makes it worth every trouble. The transformation process's baseline is to make delivery quicker, cost less, and provide better solutions in general. Approaches like DevOps enablement can help both large and small organizations to achieve this transformation.

The Six Steps and What They Comprise

The six-step approach works for almost any business and allows space to personalize some of its elements as per the specific organization's unique needs. The goal here is to lay a primary blueprint for the processes to be undertaken and to set probable time-oriented goals to make the enterprise transformation smoother.

• Planning and design: The first step would be to assess the existing business model to see how ready the enterprise is to transform, and at what level does the planning has to be done. This includes everything from specifying roles for professionals who will participate in curating the process design that can take the project stakeholders' best skills into account and help with a collaborative mindset.

• DevOps Centre of Excellence: A Centre of Excellence means nothing if it does not have the right amount of authority and designation. The CoE needs to be led by a DevOps executive who can tie together the support from all the different stakeholder teams involved in the project. Other participants in this space include individuals representing each stakeholder team and teams on the part of the various vendors as well. The initial phase of CoE is hugely crucial in solidifying the goals and plans of the organization. The more practical approach to select the leader of CoE at its initial stage would be to go for an external business partner and then slowly internalize the role over a certain period.

• Program governance: The work culture that we spoke of before has a significant influence on any business's transition process. Establishing a governance plan helps with this very culture of the business enterprise. The DevOps transformation will result in changed job roles for many professionals. They should have access to relevant knowledge, empowerment, and authority to adapt to their responsibilities successfully.

• Project intake estimation: project intake is not oriented solely to the tools and strategies at hand but focuses on the proper scaling of said tools and methods. The entire process of selecting accelerators, solutions and development approaches need to be more intentional and purposeful. It is not enough to establish an intake process since it does not help the project until all the stakeholders are aware of it. Once the organization's necessary communication is done, the intake process should be altered and evolved according to the received feedback if necessary.

• Assessment and initiation of pilot projects: It is necessary to identify target portfolios and scale the organization's operations before starting the actual project. The right way to execute it would be by applying the pilot projects according to the domains of the development process. The aim is to stream-map the value of a particular application with the representatives of all the stakeholder teams involved in the process. The execution should affect complex operations necessary and sufficient to scale the end-to-end as-is process, tools and solutions, process automation, and human resources.

• DevOps Scaling: Finally, the last step would be to gather the feedback from all the pilot projects' parameters and scale all those by executing release trains for different portfolios. Automated deployment and daily build practices are necessary, but they are far from being sufficient. The ultimate step to ensure a successful DevOps transformation is perpetual feedback and improvement according to it.

The six-step approach is a basic framework that encapsulates the requirements and limitations of all organizations in general. Even though there are scopes of customizing them according to the specific organization's needs, too much deviation from the given model can be a warning sign. The success of DevOps relies mostly on the change in the organization's culture and how well they can accommodate it. However, that does not eliminate the need for external tools.

The Popular Tools Used

Some of the most frequently used tools in the DevOps environment include:

Source Code Storage: Cloudforce, Git, TFS

Server: Jenkins, Artifactory

Configuration management: Puppet, Salt, Fresh

Automated testing: Selenium, Water

Virtual IT infrastructure: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services

Summing Up

The challenge of business transformation with DevOps can be intimidating. Still, if an organization sticks to the framework and can harness the relevant skillset for every operation, the process will be a success with certainty.