DevOps Workforce Readiness to Achieve your 2019 Goals: A Case Study

DevOps, which has been lauded as the organizational methodology of the future, is uber-valuable towards the development and growth of an enterprise, across a vast plane of fronts. In general, it has been unanimously declared one of the most effective methodologies for increasing the overall bottom line of an enterprise; all the while enabling the coveted ‘Continuous Delivery’. The coming of newer technological possibilities has brought a whole new set of challenges; however, and implementing DevOps is now proving somewhat more challenging than before. This is due to the lack of necessary workforce readiness, pertaining to conceptual implementation of DevOps in 2019.

Workforce readiness, pertaining to DevOps, is a significant issue, considering all the organizational hiccups even within multinational entities being common. Following are some examples of the same:

• 39 percent surveyed employees admit to minimal collaboration within the workplace.
• IT downtime can cost up to $540,000 an hour. (Gartner)

Considering the statistics above, a case study was performed on a company that was consistently underperforming with respect to application development and delivery. Said company, although barely a decade old; already had siloes in place that prevented the workforce from leveraging their expertise in a collaborative manner. To maintain organizational privacy, the name and particulars of the enterprise have been protected.

Aims

The study aims to establish the significance of collaboration and enhanced delivery (DevOps core concepts), while evaluating the ROI that can be gained by equipping the workforce to eliminate downtime, increase collaboration, and automate multiple processes. Overall, the study will ascertain how DevOps professionals and teams can mitigate the negatives associated with a non-DevOps framework, in order to achieve business goals in 2019.

Method

The study was carried out in the form of a detailed analysis of the company’s experience with legacy systems and practices; the ramifications of not implementing a collaborative effort towards operations and development, as well as the resulting challenges faced. The detractors were itemized with regards to the affected processes and departments, and the results were determined while observing the benefit of the solution with respect to each area.

Results

*As mentioned earlier, to protect the identity of the company and its business interests, the study will not be revealing the name of the company. Instead, said company will be referred to as ‘Enterprise S’.

According to the findings of the study, Enterprise S experienced a noticeable dip in production efficiency, brought about by increased downtime caused by power outages, employee-centric process retardation and inconsistent value delivery. Following is the itemized list of particulars:

• Increased time taken for transitioning from idea generation, to development, to production, and finally launch.
• Extensively compartmentalized workforce unable to grasp Agile concepts.
• Little to no familiarity with continuous delivery.
• Little to no familiarity with DevOps concepts, as well as implementation.

The setbacks began when the business began to grow, and the company wasn’t able to attain the predefined goals that were in place. The project was not being optimally managed due to a lack of communication and the product was not up to the expectations of the customer, due to a lack of understanding pertaining to customer experience.

Summary

Due to a lack of awareness pertaining to Agile concepts, and modern technological expertise, the company was unable to combat the situation effectively, which led to the subsequent dip in profits. Judging the situation to be dire, while recognizing the need for effective DevOps training, Enterprise S approached us, looking for DevOps training as the primary measure to enable Agile organizational function. The reason for the performance retardation, and the impact it caused, was found to be very little inclination and investment in the way of DevOps concept implementation and training, as well as overall workforce readiness within the enterprise.

Discussion

A significant chink in the organization’s armor was revealed as a result of the analysis. While the enterprise possessed rudimentary process improvement knowledge, there was a clear lack of workforce readiness, which led to the team(s) responsible for implementing DevOps concepts, being ill-equipped to do so. Further research into the case of Enterprise S revealed almost no modern innovative knowledge in the dev teams, as well as no collaboration between the teams responsible for improving the bottom line.

Following are some of the key learnings from the research:

• Workforce readiness is extremely important, especially for companies that produce B2b products.
• DevOps training was not provided to the teams, resulting in greater project and product management complexity.
• The operations and development teams were not equipped to handle production setbacks, falling employee engagement, and slowing product delivery, among other issues.

Recommendations

As we discovered from the study, there is a clear lack of well-equipped, effective DevOps teams, as well as overall workforce readiness in the industry as a whole. As we found out while working with Enterprise S towards the enablement of DevOps concepts; a well-trained and efficient workforce and DevOps teams can be the make or break factor in terms of organizational success in 2019.

Immediately after, the situation was improved post provision of DevOps training after Enterprise S approached us for the same; which we provided. Enterprises took our Agile Software Development with Team Foundation Server and Kubernetes Administration courses, which enabled them to improve their collaborative processes, and transition to a much more effective model, while instilling the much-needed workforce readiness in their DevOps teams.