The aim of DevOps is to enable organisations to develop enterprise software with speed, quality and cost-efficiency. All too often one of these elements is sacrificed, with organisations finding it near impossible to deliver all three.
Enter DevOps; an approach that brings IT and development teams closer together with the objective of building in ownership across the development cycle, as well as closer collaboration between teams. The results – better performance, fewer incidents and quicker development.
The challenge is ensuring that development teams have the right expertise to deliver on the DevOps promise.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to getting DevOps implementation right, there are certain skills we think that every DevOps team needs for success.
In this blog, we take a look at these 9 critical skills:
Skill #1: Strong problem-solving mindset
DevOps is an open-book of possibilities, with no one-size-fits-all solution to implementation. The same can be said for the problems and challenges that will inevitably need to be tackled along the DevOps journey. However, having a team with a strong problem-solving mindset is an excellent first step. Your team should include people who live for technical challenges and get a kick out of solving them with out-of-the-box thinking.
Skill #2: Ability to deliver PoC and evaluate DevOps solutions
Following on from that, your DevOps teams need to stay innovative and adaptable in a rapidly evolving field. This flexibility enables teams to select cost-effective and high-performing tools whilst mitigating risk by identifying potential issues early making sure that solutions are compatible and scalable. This also helps maintain a competitive edge by efficiently integrating the best tools and practices into the DevOps workflow.
Skill #3: Clear communication
This skill isn’t just important for DevOps landscapes, but all work-related aspects; clear and concise communication across the teams and their people is key to success. Good communication helps teams collaborate – important for delivery teams working on smaller parts of one wider product or architecture. Poor communication can lead to misinterpretation of requirements, lack of clarity across common DevOps approaches, and will ultimately have a negative impact on the power that the DevOps methodology can have.
Skill #4: Well-defined documentation
Documentation is just as important as communication for successful DevOps adoption and operation. Clear, up-to-date documentation ensures that standards are explicitly defined and makes it easier for your teams to understand exactly what has been done, and how it’s been done. It also helps with onboarding new team members as the processes are laid out in a straightforward way.
We suggest creating documentation for:
- Team-specific operations, systems, pipelines, ways of working
- Department or company standards for expected ways of working and expected toolsets
- How the various stages of DevOps should be tackled
Skill #5: Agility
A culture of continuous improvement, collaboration, and responsiveness to change, is essential for delivering high-quality software quickly and efficiently. Agile practices enable your DevOps teams to break down complex projects into manageable iterations, allowing for regular feedback, rapid adjustments, and incremental progress. This approach reduces risks, enhances flexibility, and ensures that the final product better meets user needs and business objectives, ultimately leading to more successful and timely software releases.
Skill #6: Open mindedness
The dynamic nature of DevOps requires a willingness to experiment (as mentioned in skill #2), learn, and adapt to ever-evolving tools and practices. As a result, your DevOps team should be willing to embrace new ideas, technologies, and methodologies to enable innovation and continuous improvement. An open-minded approach also promotes collaboration across diverse teams, encourages diverse perspectives and creative problem-solving. This adaptability leads to more effective solutions, enhanced team cohesion, and the ability to quickly respond to changing business needs and technological advancements. Finally, maintaining an open mind helps overcome resistance to change and ensures smooth transitions along with successful adoption of new processes.
Skill #7: Time management
While having a problem-solving mindset is essential (see Skill #1), there needs to be a balance between the time spent solving complex problems in-house and seeking external help. This doesn’t mean giving up at the first sign of complexity; rather having the awareness of when to for help. In this way, you and your team can stay focused on delivery and meeting tight DevOps deadlines.
Skill #8: Automation proficiency
Automation should be embraced where possible to significantly increase the efficiency, reliability, and scalability of software development and deployment processes. Especially for repetitive tasks, like code integration, testing (80/20 rule of automated to manual), and deployment. Automating these processes reduces the chance for human error while ensuring consistent performance across environments and accelerating release cycles.
Automation also frees up valuable time for the team to focus on more complex and strategic tasks whether that be crucial functionality for the product or innovation through conducting PoCs (Skill #2). Additionally, proficient automation methods enable smooth scaling of operations to meet growing business demands and ensure seamless integration of new features and updates.
Skill #9: Understanding performance stats
Finally, it is vital for DevOps teams to be able to track and monitor not just system/application performance stats, but – arguably more importantly – the performance stats of the DevOps delivery teams.
The former are important for ensuring that the solutions and applications are efficient and usable by the desired end users. While the latter are crucial to ensure that the delivery teams are held accountable, using DORA metrics, for example.
For both, however, you and your teams need the skills to interpret the stats, create solutions and then take action to implement improvements.
More insights on other critical skills required to ensure successful DevOps adoption can be found in our recently-published DevOps research paper DevSecOps: Bridging the gap or widening the Divide?
