How to create a successful DevOps organizational structure

Therefore, organizations must continuously measure the effectiveness of their DevOps team structure, roles, and environment. Start at the organization level, hire and manage the right talent required for the organization. Work at the team level, designing and structuring your processes, defining roles and responsibilities of DevOps teams, and choosing the right technology stack. Then go down to the individual level to touch every member of the team. The secret to success in a DevOps environment is gaining top-down buy-in across the organization. While a regular software developer writes the code to build a product, the DevOps software developer/tester is involved across the product lifecycle.

• You can use your skill map when team members are looking for growth opportunities or during the hiring process.
• Blameless provides an excellent platform for DevOps and SRE teams to align their interests and work together towards making decisions and bringing change!
• In some organizations, merging the dev and ops teams can do wonders.
• You can revisit your understanding of these DevOps team structures using Team Topologies.

In this model, a single team has shared goals with no separate functions. The reason it’s called “no ops” is because ops is so automated it’s like it doesn’t actually exist. And appoint a liaison to the rest of the company to make sure executives and line-of-business leaders know how DevOps is going, and so dev and ops can be part of conversations about the top corporate priorities. DevOps’ suggestion for you is to build product, service or micro-service API oriented small teams up to 10 people.

DevOps/SRE Team

They work with the development team to integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline, ensure data integrity, and security throughout the software lifecycle, and work to improve areas of weakness in the product. Overall, they ensure that the product stays secure every step of the way. The role of the DevOps evangelist is to remove silos between the development and operations teams.

• The responsibility of a DevOps architect is to analyse existing software development processes and create an optimized DevOps CI/CD pipeline to rapidly build and deliver software.
• Look at existing DevOps team structures that other organizations use in certain circumstances.
• It’s also important to keep security in mind and ensure that the code is well-protected against viruses and hackers.

You need to implement more configuration settings when an application accepts logins and relax rules when updates and other modes of operations are going on. Different rules should be implemented at different stages of development. Monolithic architectures that build a massive application as a single entity ruled the software landscape for years.

CloudOps or DevOps Architect

The product quality is also the sole responsibility of the Quality team. As businesses transitioned from a product-oriented development model towards a customer-centric approach, smaller release cycles, better quality, and seamless collaboration across DevOps teams became the need of the hour. DevOps is an innovative methodology that offers a set of practices that brings development and operations teams together to collaborate seamlessly and continuously deliver quality products faster and better. The original idea for DevOps wasn’t to change team structures at all. It was about development and operations teams working more closely to deliver software.

For example, if the skills needed are so specialized, you must pool them. Stream-aligned teams work on a single valuable stream of work, usually aligned to a business domain. They might focus on a specific feature or group of features, work only on one user journey, or align with a particular persona. Over the long term, cracks start to appear, spreading from the blind spots into areas the team initially did well. Many low-performing teams were previously blinkered teams that were delivering well. You can only avoid these two extremes by adopting a position somewhere in the middle.

DevOps Organization Structure 2: Dev and Ops Collaboration

DevOps’ advent has transformed the software development landscape, bringing cross-functional teams of developers, operations, and QA to seamlessly collaborate and deliver quality in an automated continuous delivery environment. With Quality Engineering and Quality Assurance going hand in hand, QA teams are happier now as quality is not just their job, but it turns into DevOps Team responsibilities. Then your solution is to spin out a new product and service, and to build another DevOps team which takes it over. Here you shouldn’t conceive product and service concepts only as entities served and provided to external clients who pay for them. But also you can freely build internal products, services or so called “micro-service APIs” and their respective DevOps teams for your internal clients. For instance if your billing system becomes too big for a team up to 10 people, then you should spin out another DevOps team which takes over database access API.

• As such, change is something that developers want, and operations worry about.
• The architect analyses existing processes and implement best practices to streamline and automate processes using the right tools and technologies.
• A C4E supplements DevOps and agile efforts due to the collaborative team structure that it builds and the self-reliant and productive environment that it creates.
• They act as a united front, with shared goals and unified product vision.

Perhaps it is easiest to start with some examples of anti-patterns — structures that are almost always doomed to fail. These organizational structures bring with them some significant hurdles to success. In the 1980’s, Jack Welsh, at the time the CEO of General Electric, introduced the idea of the “boundaryless organization” in a process that became known as GE Work-out. The focus was teams that were able to quickly make informed decisions, what people in Agile might today call self-organizing teams. Bringing DevOps to an organization means making some changes to the culture and structure of teams and the organization.

Testing moves towards the left part of the CI/CD pipeline, wherein code is automatically tested before delivering it to production. DevOps team structure plays a crucial role in fully leveraging DevOps benefits. As such, organizations should ensure that the team is built with the right people with a clear definition of DevOps roles and responsibilities.

That said, every DevOps team, no matter which form it takes, should include engineers who are skilled in both software development and IT operations. The core purpose of DevOps is to bridge the gap separating these two disciplines. Modern DevOps teams may also include other stakeholders — such as quality assurance engineers or security specialists — who can bring additional expertise to the software delivery process. DevOps does not of course suggest you to break and reorganize all ongoing projects at your organization in one go. A non-disruptive, but still impactful way of adapting your teams for DevOps methodology is to inject functional experts into projects teams. It’s likely to succeed if the team has members from both existing teams and where it’s a stepping stone to cross-functional teams.