This article draws on reporting originally published by Computer Weekly (computerweekly.com) and insights shared at the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES 2017) in London.
Why Enterprises Are Betting on DevOps
A benchmarking study by the Hackett Group, titled Beyond World-Class Service: IT’s Digital Capability Imperative, identified DevOps as a key enabler of digital transformation. The report concluded that “agile, DevOps and continuous development models are well-suited to digital business transformation, which demands accelerated development, rapid prototyping and incremental value.”
Supporting evidence comes from a Forrester survey of 4,976 IT professionals, which found that firms with high-performing business technology solution delivery organisations were 1.5 times more likely than their peers to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals.
European adoption is already significant. A survey of 750 IT decision-makers conducted for Claranet found that 29% of European businesses had already adopted a DevOps approach at the time of publication, with a further 54% expecting to do so within two years. Respondents cited better applications (54%), greater operational efficiency (53%), and improved customer satisfaction (45%) as the primary drivers.
Despite this momentum, translating DevOps intent into tangible outcomes is proving harder than many organisations anticipated. Three recurring challenges dominate enterprise conversations: broken delivery pipelines, difficulties scaling DevOps culture, and acquiring the right skills.
Fixing a Broken DevOps Pipeline
“There is an understandable rush to implement DevOps as the promise of delivering technology faster and more efficiently is compelling,” says Tim Russell, chief product officer at Perforce. “The immediacy of action often drives quick-fix or easiest-path solutions that, in turn, drive significant yet unintended downstream costs and efforts, even if it seems as though improvements are visible in parts of the process.”
Chris Hill, software development manager at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), described this challenge in a video interview with Computer Weekly filmed at DOES 2017 in London. “A poor software development lifecycle is slower than it needs to be, has roadblocks and a slow path to production,” he said. If a developer cannot clearly see how to get code into production, or the path is convoluted, features are simply not released as quickly as they could be.
JLR faces a constraint that is common in embedded-systems industries: when putting software into vehicles, the team does not have the relative simplicity of a web deployment model. Spinning up a fleet of physical vehicles to run automated test suites is not feasible, so the team relies on virtualisation and software-based infrastructure to build code that is representative of the production vehicle’s operating environment. This is a reminder that some technology constraints are genuinely immutable and cannot be resolved purely through cultural change.
Legacy IT presents a related obstacle. Justin Dean, senior vice-president for technical operations at Ticketmaster, described at the Cloud Native Computing Forum how DevOps principles can still apply to teams managing legacy software stacks. At Ticketmaster, the team that writes software also carries operational duties. A key part of Ticketmaster’s DevOps transformation involved giving those teams access to the technical environments needed to deploy software independently.
One practical approach Ticketmaster adopted is a formalised work pipeline: tasks requiring legacy team involvement are submitted through a structured queue. Once completed, the DevOps team proceeds with deployment. Dean’s assessment of containerised delivery was direct: “When you deliver software in a container through a pipeline, it forces a massive change. This single-handedly had more impact than anything else and dovetailed into DevOps.”
The Challenge of Scaling a DevOps Culture
Culture remains one of the most cited barriers to successful DevOps adoption. While DevOps is often framed as a software development and IT operations concern, sustained success requires a shift in mindset across the wider business — including product, finance, and senior leadership.
BBVA, the multinational banking group, has applied DevOps at scale across multiple regions as part of a broader transformation programme. Speaking at DOES 2017, Brian Timmeny, head of advanced engineering, DevOps and IT processes at BBVA, acknowledged that “when you scale DevOps at more than a team level, some things can become more prescriptive.” His advice to large enterprises: start with a simple, clear message — “you are going to achieve speed and you are going to achieve quality.”
With around 140,000 employees and approximately 12,000 developers, BBVA’s transformation had to involve the business directly. The bank began by working to define what a “BBVA product” actually means internally. “One of the key tenets of DevOps is for a team to have end-to-end responsibility for the product,” said Timmeny. “You have a team that will build it, deploy it and monitor it — they will own it, cradle to grave.”
The difficulty is that large organisations are typically structured by function, not by product. Timmeny’s practical solution was to establish truly self-sufficient internal teams first, then gradually wrap a business function around each team. “This gives us a place to start — to have a set of core principles that, to begin with, can be done in a minimal viable way. Over time, everything else will evolve.”
This approach required top-down executive support, which was available at BBVA in part because the financial sector broadly recognises the urgency of technological transformation. Without visible leadership commitment, scaling DevOps culture across a large enterprise is likely to stall.
Getting the Right Skills
Hiring external experts to close a DevOps skills gap can seem like the fastest solution, but Forrester cautions against relying too heavily on external recruitment. Its report Organise and Staff I&O Pros for Successful DevOps Practices noted that DevOps role vacancies rose by 15% between December 2015 and December 2016, pushing salaries up — while also increasing the risk of candidates who have “DevOps washed” their CVs to appear more experienced than they are.
Forrester principal analyst Amy DeMartine articulated the broader skills requirement: “The success of the integrated product team relies on the ability to pull expertise from all resources required to create a successful digital solution. Resources from application development and IT and operations professionals need expertise from security professionals, customer experience professionals, QA, and enterprise and business architecture professionals. The success of these teams is measured by meeting the customer experience goals.”
Tom Clark, head of common platform at ITV and a DevOps advocate, offered a more direct hiring framework when speaking to Computer Weekly at DOES 2017. “As technology has moved forward, the skills you require have moved up. But at ITV we have boiled it down to two qualities: you have to be smart and you have to be kind. Anything else is a bonus.”
At ITV, “smart” means the capacity to adapt to change — since today’s tooling will not be tomorrow’s. “Kind” means the ability to integrate into and strengthen a team. Clark put it plainly: “Don’t be a douche, just be nice.”
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- Audit your pipeline first. Visible improvements in one part of a delivery pipeline can mask deeper bottlenecks downstream. Map the full path to production before selecting tools or restructuring teams.
- Legacy integration needs a formal interface. A structured work-queue model between legacy and cloud-native teams, as used at Ticketmaster, can reduce friction without requiring a full legacy re-platform.
- Define what a “product” means in your organisation. DevOps team ownership is meaningless without a shared, business-level definition of the product a team is responsible for.
- Scale culture top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. BBVA’s experience shows that executive sponsorship is necessary but not sufficient — self-sufficient teams must also be built from the ground up.
- Screen for adaptability, not just current toolchain knowledge. Given how rapidly the DevOps toolchain evolves, the ability to learn matters more than familiarity with any specific tool.
- Be wary of CV inflation. With DevOps salaries rising and demand outstripping supply, skills validation during hiring is essential.