The idea of a self-organizing DevOps team is compelling: promote business growth by combining automation at all levels with the innovation that emerges when individuals take ownership and focus on progressive transformation in an environment that encourages continuous improvement. Members of self-organizing teams need a clear understanding of their business goals and enough autonomy to decide how to achieve them.
In the context of rapidly changing market dynamics, some industry observers argue there is no other effective way to operate. Jason Bloomberg, president of Intellyx — an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on agile digital transformation — frames it this way:
“Self-organization is nature’s way of building adaptable systems. The more dynamic and disruptive the business environment, the more important business agility becomes at an enterprise level.”
— Jason Bloomberg, Intellyx
Self-organization at the team level helps large organizations achieve that enterprise-level agility. Yet because DevOps continues to evolve differently across organizations, practical guidance on building self-organizing teams has been limited. Part of the difficulty is what Bloomberg describes as a “Zen” factor: self-organization resists the imposition of rigid order around workloads, budgets, toolsets, and reviews. The following sections cover the key considerations for building self-organizing DevOps teams.
Take a Cue from Agile
One of the most productive places to look for guidance is the Agile Manifesto. Tan Moorthy, head of global services for application development and management at Infosys, describes DevOps as “a natural progression from agile.” Like self-organizing agile teams, self-organizing DevOps teams should be built around motivated individuals who work toward shared goals and incorporate practices such as automation, built-in quality, and traceability.
Continuous improvement also demands that every team member be proactive about seeking better ways to work. Nick Meshes, director of analytics and optimization at Sandstorm Design, recommends that this mindset translate into concrete behaviors:
- Create proofs of concept individually or collaboratively.
- Integrate tools and practices to improve processes.
- Incorporate automated testing, scripted builds, and deployment pipelines.
- Agree on tools and platforms as a team, tailored to the specific project’s needs.
- When mistakes or process issues arise, work together on resolution and incorporate improvements into defined processes and automated procedures.
Bloomberg stresses that self-organization should not equate to chaos. Teams benefit from training and experience in how to align and organize themselves before they are expected to do so independently. With that foundation in place, Moorthy recommends that governance focus on three things:
- A unified view of processes and metrics across the value stream at the system level.
- Effective communications, early feedback mechanisms, and dashboards to foster a culture of continual experimentation, learning, and improvement.
- An automation blueprint that the team owns and evolves over time.
For defining and refining roles, Moorthy suggests thinking of self-organizing DevOps teams as working like Scrum teams. IT and business stakeholders collaborate to prioritize requirements and build a minimum viable product that delivers early and incremental value. In DevOps terms, development, test, and operations work together under one umbrella in a prime-and-backup model that promotes team development and handles cross-functional activities.
Meshes adds that cross-training is particularly valuable: it ensures that team structure changes and scheduling shifts do not disrupt DevOps processes, and it reinforces shared responsibility for collaboration and role definition.
As an example of results, Moorthy points to work Infosys performed for a US-based media company that used agile methodology and a self-organized DevOps team to migrate one of its portfolio companies to an open-source architecture. According to Moorthy, the client reduced release cycle time by 50 percent, improving time-to-market and expanding its customer base.
Learn from the Business
Self-organizing DevOps teams also stand to benefit from business knowledge accumulated over decades — knowledge that technology organizations often overlook. Donnie Berkholz, research director for development, DevOps, and IT Ops at 451 Research, makes the point directly:
“One thing that often happens, particularly in technology organizations, is that we reinvent a lot of the things that have worked well in business units for decades. We act like it’s a brand-new idea to do something like set up a collaborative culture — to help people organize, even across functional separations. It’s not.”
— Donnie Berkholz, 451 Research
Berkholz points to well-established, statistics-based business approaches — such as inventory management methods used in retail — as models for ensuring that people with the right DevOps expertise are available on demand for the roles needed on a given project. Applying similar resource-allocation thinking to engineering teams, especially across functions, addresses one of the hardest challenges in flat or fully self-organizing structures: making sure the right expertise is always accessible.
“It takes a lot of process overhead to put into place the things that can make self-organizing teams work well. [But] if you can make it work, there is the tremendous benefit of being able to have the right expertise to attack any problem at any time.”
— Donnie Berkholz, 451 Research
Berkholz also highlights two business fundamentals that translate directly to self-organizing DevOps practice:
- Hire for adaptability. Given the pace of change in technology, team members who can learn and adjust as the landscape shifts are more valuable than those optimized for a single narrow skill.
- Get incentives right. DevOps professionals should clearly understand what behaviors are rewarded — for example, encouraging operations engineers to engage with developers early in the design process rather than only at deployment time. Poorly aligned incentives undermine self-organization regardless of how well the team structure is designed.
Plan for Challenges
Even well-designed self-organizing DevOps teams face external pressures. Bloomberg notes that interference from management can be one of the biggest obstacles — meaning that keeping a team functioning well may be “less about incorporating self-organization than resisting externally imposed organization.”
Jeanne Morain, a digital and cloud strategist and author at iSpeakCloud, recounts a cautionary example: a DevOps director who self-organized efforts outside of executive leadership as a demonstration of the model’s value ended up demoted to an analyst role. Leadership felt that his initiative distracted team members from their primary responsibilities and that defining new roles was an executive prerogative. The lesson is not that self-organization is wrong, but that it must be pursued with organizational awareness and executive alignment.
When executive friction arises, Bloomberg recommends an open conversation about how best to meet business goals — one that elevates the discussion from specific tactical deliverables to strategic outcomes. For DevOps, that means consistently returning to the core value proposition: delivering business velocity in the face of dynamic and shifting requirements.
Key Takeaways
- Ground self-organization in agile principles. Shared goals, motivated individuals, automation, and built-in quality are the foundation.
- Governance still matters. A unified view of metrics, strong feedback loops, and an agreed-upon automation blueprint prevent self-organization from becoming chaos.
- Cross-train deliberately. Resilience against scheduling changes and personnel transitions depends on distributing knowledge across the team.
- Borrow from business management. Resource allocation, incentive design, and collaborative culture are solved problems in business — apply those solutions to DevOps.
- Manage executive relationships proactively. Self-organizing teams that operate in isolation from leadership often face backlash. Frame self-organization as a strategic enabler of business velocity, not a workaround.
Original reporting sourced from TechBeacon. Quotes attributed to Jason Bloomberg (Intellyx), Tan Moorthy (Infosys), Nick Meshes (Sandstorm Design), Donnie Berkholz (451 Research), and Jeanne Morain (iSpeakCloud).