Source: CloudBees. This article summarises episode 85 of the DevOps Radio podcast, originally published by CloudBees.
DevOps World 2020 Awards: Recognising Real-World Transformation
At DevOps World 2020, CloudBees announced the winners of its annual DevOps World awards — recognising organisations that have demonstrated measurable progress in DevOps adoption, culture, and outcomes. Episode 85 of the DevOps Radio podcast spotlighted two of those winning teams, offering candid insight into what genuine enterprise DevOps transformation looks like in practice.
DevOps Rising Star: Nationwide Building Society
The DevOps Rising Star award recognises a CloudBees customer that has embarked on a DevOps transformation within the last year and has already achieved tangible, positive results. In 2020, that award went to Nationwide Building Society, represented on the podcast by Ben Angel, Head of DevOps Engineering.
Starting the DevOps Journey
Although the award focuses on recent results, Ben noted that Nationwide’s DevOps journey had roots two to three years earlier. The organisation began by evaluating what DevOps could realistically deliver, then set out to demonstrate those benefits to the wider business.
“We started to look at what DevOps could do for us. And it showed us, showed the wider organization, the benefits that DevOps could provide when we implement proper CI/CD agile ways of working.”
— Ben Angel, Head of DevOps Engineering, Nationwide Building Society
Automation in a Regulated Environment
As a financial services organisation, Nationwide operates under strict regulatory requirements. Rather than treating compliance as a barrier to DevOps adoption, the team used automation to meet those requirements more reliably and efficiently. Ben highlighted data archiving and GDPR compliance processes as specific areas where automation delivered measurable gains.
The team also adopted a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) mindset, prioritising the delivery of value to members as quickly as possible. This pragmatic approach — shipping working solutions early and iterating — was central to their success and helped secure organisational buy-in for further DevOps investment.
Key Takeaways from Nationwide’s Approach
- Start by demonstrating concrete benefits to the wider organisation, not just the engineering team.
- Use CI/CD and agile practices together — neither is sufficient alone in a regulated environment.
- Automate compliance and governance processes, not just application delivery pipelines.
- An MVP approach accelerates value delivery and builds internal credibility for DevOps programmes.
Diversity in DevOps Award: IRS and Citizant
The Diversity in DevOps award recognises an organisation that has done two things: implemented diversity and inclusion practices within its DevOps community that embrace the uniqueness of all employees, and adopted practices that empower team members to drive innovation and stronger business outcomes.
The 2020 winner was the joint team formed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and its consulting partner Citizant. The podcast featured Rupesh Kumar, Solutions Director for Agile/DevOps at Citizant, alongside colleagues from the IRS client organisation.
Breaking Down Silos in a Federal Agency
The IRS, as a large federal agency, came with deeply entrenched organisational silos — a common challenge in government IT environments. Rupesh described how the joint team addressed this by establishing a joint innovation lab where experimentation was actively encouraged and failure was treated as a learning mechanism rather than a risk to be avoided.
“We actually started doing a lot of experimentations. We had a joint innovation lab set up within IRS where we did a lot of analysis to see how can we fail fast.”
— Rupesh Kumar, Solutions Director – Agile/DevOps, Citizant
Scaling Across 45 Applications
The team’s initial experiments produced a DevOps model that proved viable across 45 of the agency’s applications. From there, the focus shifted to scaling the approach — which required more than technical work. It meant educating colleagues throughout the agency, documenting what had been learned, and building the internal consensus necessary to sustain change in a large bureaucratic environment.
People and Process Over Tools
Perhaps the most enduring insight from the IRS/Citizant team is one that applies to any DevOps transformation, regardless of industry or scale:
“DevOps is just not technology and tools. It’s people and process, and they are the one who actually drive the innovation.”
— Rupesh Kumar, Solutions Director – Agile/DevOps, Citizant
Key Takeaways from the IRS/Citizant Approach
- Structured experimentation — through an innovation lab or equivalent — can overcome cultural resistance to change in large organisations.
- A “fail fast” mindset is achievable even in risk-averse government environments when framed correctly.
- Solutions proven at small scale must be accompanied by education and stakeholder engagement to scale successfully.
- Diversity and inclusion are not separate from DevOps culture — they are a precondition for sustainable innovation.
Listen to the Full Episode
The full conversations with Ben Angel and Rupesh Kumar are available on episode 85 of DevOps Radio, produced by CloudBees. The episode provides additional context on both organisations’ tooling choices, team structures, and the cultural shifts that underpinned their award-winning transformations.
Whether you’re leading a DevOps programme in financial services, government, or any other regulated sector, the experiences shared by these two teams offer grounded, practical lessons on making DevOps work at enterprise scale.