DevOps – The Beginners Run Down

“What’s the deal with DevOps?” you might ask yourself. “I finally got my IT team on the same page when it comes to ITIL, now I have something else to walk them through?”

The purpose of DevOps for the most part is to ensure that all the IT teams are working towards the same goal, your business outcomes. Think about your IT team for a moment, specifically your development and operations teams. Culturally they are set up in a way which is counter-intuitive to deliver successful results. There may be an “Us vs. Them” mentality engrained in their cultures, they may even sit in geographically different locations.

You need to crawl before you can run. Make sure that your teams are working together in better relationships before you can do anything else. It sounds simple enough doesn’t it? The challenge is that the whole "Dev vs. Ops" mentality is fairly common. See if you recognize these common complaints.
“Operations always has so many roadblocks for deployments, we never can make the customer happy”
“Development is in such a rush they deploy stuff that breaks after a week”

Any of that sound familiar?
Before teams get too far ahead of themselves thinking about tools that can perform deployments at the speed of light they should think about what DevOps proposes at its fundamental level, IT being on the same page. In effect DevOps should be part of a bigger picture, and may include several frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT to name a couple to get IT where they can be more of a strategic partner. The key is to find the balance from these frameworks and determine what works best for your organization to achieve your business outcomes.

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