ScalingDevOps

Scaling DevOps
We will explore-unlearn-relearnDiscuss consideration of DevOps Maturity,Compliance & Evolution
Canada DevOps Community of Practice
***How do we address these strategic gaps when #Scaling #DevOps?***
Gunjan Syal
support from leadership - instead of always asking teams for options and solutions- I think DevOps needs strong #leaders who are willing to roll up sleeves and jump in.
Vishnu Vasudevan
Centralize DevOps team with Risk, governance, compliance , Info security , Dev, QA, Ops and product team together and keep them apprised on a daily basis helps to build a global strategy to bridge the gaps.
SteveZheng
Always do the Agile & DevOps Maturity evaluation first.
Garima Bajpai
Create a scaling up strategy - Pace ( gradual/rapid) , Centralized/Decentralized , Flexible -fixed process ,Expert-driven/ or grass root journey
Peter Maddison
Provide guidance and support at all layers of the organization. Create understanding around key tenants, that it is a journey and why they are doing it at all
Peter Maddison
Enable your fast moving, more advanced teams to develop their own DevOps practices within organizational guardrails. Use their learnings to enable your central team that is enabling the rest of the organization.
Canada DevOps Community of Practice
***Are there any #strategic gaps to look at before scaling #DevOps - Governance, Compliance or Maturity?***
Gunjan Syal
1) A lot of times organizations are taking on DevOps and Agile journeys at the same time but they’re not always aligned - they need to be (so governance needs to align them)
Vishnu Vasudevan
i see huge gaps at big enterprises, Governance, compliance, risk management teams are always outside the devops organization and it is very difficult to bring them to an alignment and they cannot work in silos when it comes digital transformation.

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Gunjan Syal
2) alignment on the #businesscase (the ultimate reason for how DevOps will help the org) - this provides clear guardrails and enables autonomy for the team to develop a concrete governance
Peter Maddison
If senior leadership is identified as needing to change, will they?
Gunjan Syal
another one: starting devops at the side of desk for most people, and then not being able to scale due to lack of focus
Peter Maddison
Investing solely in technology and underestimating the investment needed in people.
Canada DevOps Community of Practice
***What do you think are the top challenges in scaling #DevOps?***
Gunjan Syal
culture, communication and change management aspects, especially if org is new to #Agile as well - acceptance of failure is a tough one for most traditional orgs. Often this leads to lack of expectations management at all levels -> signal: employees exiting
Garima Bajpai
Scaling the value not outcome. Distribute accountability & Long term vision for Value
SteveZheng
Should not start from a "big plan" and implement much practice at the same time.

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Peter Maddison
Change management outside of technology to create the needed common understanding. Lack of capability and skills. Insufficient top-level buy-in to make the changes to financial management and personal incentives.
Gunjan Syal
@canada_devops Are there specific strategies that work when having the change in role discussions. i.e. dev roles to include QA and support/ ops pieces?
Gunjan Syal
In my experience, this conversation gets buried a little due to cultural challenges, until its too late
SteveZheng
pair them. pair coding is not only for the dev roles, but for all role in a team.
Peter Maddison
Bring all groups tot he table and focus on the overall outcomes. Value Stream Mapping can help as an exercise. It can also expose friction. However, exposing that friction and dealign with it is necessary to move forward.
Garima Bajpai
work on incentives , upskilling , cross functional & make it a safe place to collaborate & experiment
Vishnu Vasudevan
PI planning, having everyone as part of product planning and grooming stage to make them understand that they are responsible for the product equally.
Peter Maddison
For the team to take on the other roles there are many changes need to occur in terms of accountability. Switching to a product based delivery from project based helps. Changing the metrics and creating commonality in objectives and how they are measured.
William Szepesi
A recent chat regarding security showed me the importance of individual buy in as well as teams and the overall organization
Canada DevOps Community of Practice
***What are the first 3 steps towards DevOps at scale?***
Gunjan Syal
Start with small teams
encourage skill development with a culture of fail fast fail often - then fix it
Support from leadership
As you approach scaled part: clarity across organization on what they want to achieve from DevOps
SteveZheng
Pilot Team, start small, technical practice first.
William Szepesi
automation is required for any DevOps implementation and more is needed when scaling
Peter Maddison
Remember the basics: Clarify your outcomes and define your indicators. Start small. Celebrate your wins.
William Szepesi
@pgmaddison Good approach Peter - and this would include starting with initial, achievable goals, so that there will be wins to build on
Garima Bajpai
Create a north star - Value , Assess the Challenge , Enact Change
Vishnu Vasudevan
adopt and adapt to cultural change, empower the team with the tools they need and managing risks at the individual level.
Canada DevOps Community of Practice
***When do you think is the right time to scale DevOps or optimize DevOps?***
Garima Bajpai
Right time to scale, don’t get caught up in complexity before the value
Gunjan Syal
To understand that we need to talk about what does a successful devOps project look like and then consider conditions for scaling it up- To me it’s not so much the right time but
knowing what conditions are needed for success and then,
what you need to get there
Peter Maddison
DevOps as a transformation of how your organization delivers value will scale naturally as the organization begins to understand and adopt new ways of working.
Vishnu Vasudevan
There is no such thing as right time. Optimization is a continuous process and scaling is done via feedback loops within the organization on what is working and what is not. when there is continuous feedback scaling becomes organic.
Peter Maddison
Start small and use those initial wins to drive communication across the organization. It is not just an "IT" change. How the organization organizes around technology delivery needs to change too.
SteveZheng
You need to tall enough to implement some of the DevOps practice.
Vishnu Vasudevan
optimization is otherwise fail fast, take smart risks.
Garima Bajpai
@vishnube continuous optimization
William Szepesi
Scaling DevOps should happen when there is potential for it to pay off, providing value that other solutions can not
Peter Maddison
Optimizing DevOps is intrinsic to the practices. Continuous learning and optimization is a part of growing your DevOps practices.
William Szepesi
Welcome everyone to the Scaling DevOps Crowd Chat!
Garima Bajpai
Right time to scale, don’t get caught up in complexity before the value
Canada DevOps Community of Practice
Good Morning Everyone!

Hope you brought your DevOps Game!
Here is the first question.


What do you refer to as DevOps?
Garima Bajpai
DevOps is a collective journey towards evolution of software practices
Gunjan Syal
Agreed with Garima. This is especially important during the pandemic because customer needs and regulations have been changing quickly and the businesses must be nimble to pivot and serve those needs.
Vishnu Vasudevan
it's a combination of cultural philosophies, practices,process governance, automations, tools that increases the ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity and better software and at the same empower the development and operations teams
Garima Bajpai
Its not to tool/job title or a specification .. from the grass root journey perspective
Peter Maddison
Generic answer: People, processes and tools working
together to enable rapid and continuous
delivery of value to customers.
SteveZheng
The tools chain and practice which can ensure the delivery.
William Szepesi
Good question! Agreement has not been found so I go Wikipedia:.
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle & provide continuous delivery with high SW quality