While the rate of DevOps adoption has certainly increased over the last couple of years, the DevOps Institute Upskilling report for 2020 indicates that of the 1260 individuals who responded to this year’s survey more than 50% still find the DevOps transformation journey difficult. And, of those who read the report, there is probably a number of individuals questioning the validity of the data.

But I am honestly not surprised by this. In my role at IBM and now HCL, I have been blessed with the opportunity to travel the world and chat with multiple organizations about starting off or advancing their DevOps capabilities. Early on, I was always asked “Where should I start?”. And while the frequency of that question has decreased the questions like: “Where should I begin?”,  “How well are we doing?”, “How do I know if we are making progress?”, “Is the money I am spending offering a return on that investment?” are still top of mind for many executives.

The reality is that the opinion one has is often influenced by the area of their execution and concern. Many, so many personal factors could instill these feelings and the responses. According to the DevOps Institute, a DevOps Transformation means…”a fundamental change in the traditional structure of IT. It not only represents the adoption of new technology but also, and more importantly, an organizational transformation challenge with all that it implies in terms of “evangelization” of the existing responsibility silos. It certainly may be perceived as threatening for several structures which are comfortable in the existing traditional organizational model.”.

A DevOps practitioner may be thinking, “WHAT? It just wasn’t that hard… the team wanted to automate the pipeline to deploy faster. We implemented a continuous deployment solution which integrated with the existing continuous integration solution and automated some tests. Now, Developers write the code, the commit kicks off the build, things are deployed, the code is checked – simple.  We are doing DevOps!” But maybe not so fast….

Executives are looking at a DevOps transformation using a very difference lens or multiple lens spanning – organizational change, new technology, business and market demands, customer feedback, and competition. While the practitioner may be focused on using technology to solve a particular technical problem, executives are looking to DevOps as a means to achieve their business objectives while asking their charges to change the way they do, they think, they operate. Implementing change across one small team is easy in comparison to changing the IT strategy for an entire corporation.

But, help is available! An HCLSoftware DevOps Workshop is all about having those discussions – understanding the organization’s DevOps Strategy, facilitating discussion across what are typically disparate groups (silos), gaining an understanding of and mapping the end to end process, and plotting a course to move forward with a clear vision on how to deliver business results.

A DevOps transformation is big and you can’t do everything at once. However, if you have a clear vision for the possible, a roadmap to follow, and an understand of the tasks to complete, enterprises look to the moon and achieve all that heavenly glory they are chasing.

Requesting your DevOps workshop is just a click away!