This article is based on findings from the 2017 State of DevOps Report, published by Puppet and DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), and reporting from Computer Weekly on the DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2017.
Leadership as a DevOps Performance Driver
The 2017 State of DevOps Report, compiled annually by software automation vendor Puppet and DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), draws on responses from more than 3,200 DevOps practitioners worldwide. Among its most significant findings: the behaviour and communication style of senior leaders is a powerful predictor of whether an organisation will become a high-performing DevOps team.
The report identifies five characteristics that high-performing DevOps leaders tend to share. Effective leaders are described as:
- Inspirational — they motivate teams around a shared purpose.
- Communicative — they keep engineers informed and aligned.
- Visionary — they articulate a clear direction for technology transformation.
- Supportive — they remove obstacles and provide cover for teams taking calculated risks.
- Recognition-focused — they actively acknowledge and reward good work.
The report found a direct correlation between these leadership traits and team performance: “Low-performing teams reported the lowest levels of these traits, and teams that reported the least transformative leaders were half as likely to be high-performers.”
Why Senior Sponsorship Is Non-Negotiable
One recurring theme in DevOps adoption is the grassroots transformation narrative—engineers quietly improving pipelines and practices without top-down mandates. The 2017 report acknowledges this happens, but argues it is the exception rather than the rule.
According to the report: “Leaders have the authority and budget to make the large-scale changes often needed; to provide visible support when a transformation is under way; and to change the incentives of entire groups of engineers, whether they are in development, quality assurance, operations or information security.”
The practical implication is significant. A senior leader can restructure team incentives, fund tooling investments, and publicly endorse cultural changes in ways that individual contributors simply cannot. Without that sponsorship, DevOps initiatives frequently stall at the team or department level and fail to scale.
Gene Kim, co-author of The DevOps Handbook and DORA general partner, summarised the finding at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London in June 2017: “Leadership matters and it matters even more than we initially thought. It turns out that leadership significantly amplifies the ability for organisations to become high-performers.”
The Widening Gap Between High and Low Performers
The 2017 report also examined how high- and low-performing teams compare on two core software delivery metrics: throughput (deployment frequency and lead time for changes) and stability (change failure rate and mean time to restore service).
On throughput, the gap between the two groups had narrowed compared to the 2016 edition—low-performing teams were deploying more frequently. However, this improvement came at a cost: their stability metrics had deteriorated. High-performing teams, by contrast, continued to improve on both dimensions simultaneously.
DORA co-founder Nicole Forsgren explained the dynamic: “With the low-performers, this is the first time we are seeing evidence of these trade-offs, where they are trying to get this throughput, but at the expense of stability. And it’s not working very well at all.”
The key insight the report draws from this data is that the speed-versus-stability trade-off is not inherent to software delivery—it is a symptom of immature DevOps practice. Well-implemented DevOps eliminates the trade-off entirely: “If you are doing DevOps well, you are able to get this throughput and stability together. Trade-offs are not necessary. You can have it all.”
DevOps Benefits Extend Beyond Financial Performance
Now in its sixth annual edition at the time of publication, the State of DevOps Report continued to expand its definition of organisational success beyond traditional financial metrics. The 2017 data found that high-performing organisations were twice as likely to meet or exceed goals across a broader range of business outcomes, including:
- Operational efficiency
- Customer satisfaction
- Corporate social responsibility objectives
- Product and service quality and quantity targets
Critically, this held true for both for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. The report concluded: “This suggests that DevOps enables mission achievement for any type of organisation, independent of industry or sector.”
Technology Stack Is Not the Deciding Factor
A common assumption in DevOps discussions is that modern cloud-native tooling is a prerequisite for transformation. The 2017 report pushed back on that notion. DORA CTO Jez Humble, also a co-author of the DevOps Handbook, pointed to his own experience working with legacy systems inside the US federal government as evidence that DevOps practices can succeed in heavily regulated, technically complex environments.
Humble also issued a pointed warning in the other direction: “Just because you’re working in a new environment with shiny technology, you can still end up with a horrible, big-bang, orchestrated deployment that happens to be on Kubernetes.”
The implication is clear: tooling choices matter far less than cultural and organisational practices. Adopting containers, microservices, or any other modern technology does not automatically confer DevOps maturity. Leadership, communication, and disciplined engineering practices remain the primary levers.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Leaders
- Invest in leadership development. Technical training alone is insufficient. Leaders who demonstrate transformational behaviours—communication, vision, recognition—directly improve team performance outcomes.
- Don’t accept the speed-stability trade-off. If your team is shipping faster but breaking more, your DevOps implementation needs attention. High performers achieve both simultaneously.
- Measure beyond deployment metrics. Customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and mission outcomes are all valid and measurable indicators of DevOps maturity.
- Environment is not an excuse. Legacy systems, regulated industries, and complex architectures are not barriers to DevOps success—they require the same cultural and leadership fundamentals as any other context.
- Modern tooling is not a substitute for practice. Running workloads on Kubernetes does not make deployments safer or faster on its own. Discipline and culture drive outcomes.
The 2017 State of DevOps Report was produced by Puppet and DORA. Original reporting on the DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2017 presentation was published by Computer Weekly.