Making DevOps grow and thrive inside a large organization is less about adopting the right tools and more about strategy, culture, and leadership. IT leaders and DevOps practitioners across several industries have distilled their experience into nine concrete tips. Whether you are just starting your DevOps journey or trying to scale an existing practice, these insights cover the areas that matter most: shared accountability, communication, measurement, mindset, skills, and continuous improvement.
1. Make Everyone Accountable to Shared Goals
Steve Burton, CD and DevOps Evangelist, Harness
Assigning people a “DevOps Engineer” title does not automatically shorten release cycles. Real progress comes from making every team member aware of the business objectives that their work supports and giving them genuine accountability for shared outcomes.
- Developers should be responsible for how their code behaves in production — not just in a test environment.
- Operations engineers should be freed from manually overseeing every release so they can focus on higher-value work.
- Compensation and incentives for both groups should be aligned to business outcomes, not individual task completion.
As Burton puts it, hiring a hundred people with “DevOps Engineer” in their title without shared goals and accountability is like putting a hundred tires on a car and expecting it to go faster. The structure must change, not just the org chart.
2. Cut the Jargon
Fin Goulding, International CIO, Aviva
Technical language creates invisible walls between IT teams and the business stakeholders whose support you need to scale DevOps. Goulding recommends leading conversations with business outcomes rather than acronyms. When pitching DevOps expansion to senior leadership or seeking additional investment, explain what will be delivered faster and more reliably — not the mechanics of CI/CD pipelines.
Goulding prefers the term Flow Teams over labels like “DevOps 2.0,” arguing that holistic, cross-functional teams focused on flow are the model that will define the most successful workplaces going forward. Whatever terminology you choose, prioritize clarity over technical precision when speaking to a mixed audience.
3. Measure Wisely and Choose the Middle Path
Mirco Hering, APAC DevOps and Agile Lead, Accenture
Before you can demonstrate progress, you need to define what success looks like and how it will be measured. Hering warns against two common traps: chasing the promises of over-eager vendors, and losing sight of practical, incremental improvement.
His “middle path” guidance:
- Do not look so far into the future that short-term wins become invisible.
- Do not be so short-sighted that you fail to build toward a longer transformation.
- Challenge the status quo, but do not demand ideological purity at the expense of pragmatic progress.
- Use technology to support your transformation, but do not place all your trust in any single tool or platform.
4. Move from a Project to a Product Mindset
Carmen DeArdo, DevOps Leader, Nationwide
The goal of a mature DevOps practice is to reduce lead time and deliver software more frequently so the business can respond quickly to change. That goal cannot be achieved when IT operates as a cost center that executes discrete projects on behalf of the business.
DeArdo advocates for a product-centric model in which IT is a full partner — not a vendor — working alongside the business to accelerate the flow of value across end-to-end product streams. This shift changes how teams are funded, how they are organized, and how their success is measured. Projects have end dates; products have ongoing owners who are continuously responsible for outcomes.
5. Balance Soft and Technical Skills on DevOps Teams
Robert Reeves, CTO, Datical
DevOps leaders need to build teams that combine human and technical capabilities. Neither alone is sufficient.
Soft Skills
- Communication: DevOps engineers accumulate knowledge that must be documented and shared effectively. Internal wikis, issue trackers, and informal knowledge-sharing sessions help ensure insights are not siloed with individuals.
- Collaboration: Effective collaboration in a DevOps context often involves tooling — for example, using chat platforms to surface alerts and outages, and running structured retrospectives to uncover process failures.
- Customer-first mindset: Even in a non-customer-facing role, DevOps engineers serve internal customers: developers, QA, project management, and business leadership. Empathy, transparency, and the ability to prioritize competing requests are essential.
Technical Skills
- System administration and engineering: A working knowledge of Linux and Windows server administration, networking fundamentals, and common infrastructure layers is foundational for DevOps engineers who need to diagnose and resolve production issues.
- Scripting and automation: Languages such as Python, Ruby, Bash, and Shell enable engineers to automate repetitive tasks, reduce human error, and free up time for higher-value work.
- Configuration management: Tools in this category allow teams to manage many servers and environments consistently — handling kernel updates, network settings, SSH key management, and tool provisioning across data centers and cloud providers.
- Identity and access governance: Controlling who can access which systems and data is both a security requirement and a productivity enabler. Familiarity with SSH keys, LDAP, and remote desktop protocols is part of a well-rounded DevOps skill set.
6. Don’t Let Alignment Goals Delay DevOps Progress
Ben Grinnell, Managing Director, North Highland
Waiting for full senior-leadership alignment before starting your DevOps implementation is a common and costly mistake. Full consensus at the executive level rarely arrives before it is too late to matter.
Grinnell recommends starting on the ground and building alignment in parallel by over-communicating early wins. The examples you share with leadership should be:
- Easy for senior leaders to understand without a technical background.
- Significant enough to register as meaningful progress.
- Relevant enough that leaders can visualize the same pattern applied to a much larger part of the business.
Define a clear direction — a North Star — but avoid getting locked in prolonged debates about a precise destination and timeline. Getting the organization moving with shared direction is more valuable than a perfect plan that never launches.
7. Tap Into the Energy of the Organization
Jonathan Smart, Head of Ways of Working, Barclays
Smart introduces the concept of Aiki — using the organization’s existing energy and momentum to drive the transformation rather than fighting against inertia. In practice, this means:
- Identifying and starting with natural champions — people who are already enthusiastic about better ways of working.
- Rewriting internal standards and processes to embed DevOps principles rather than treating them as exceptions.
- Treating internal audits as allies rather than obstacles, since a well-structured audit process can reinforce accountability and continuous improvement.
8. Beware of Isolated Innovation Teams
Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
Creating a dedicated “innovation team” to pilot DevOps practices can backfire. Isolated groups often become disconnected from the rest of the organization and produce limited transferable value. Wallgren argues that the people most willing and able to adapt to change are the ones who create transformation others can follow — and they are spread across the organization, not concentrated in a single team.
His recommendations for DevOps leaders:
- Design your organization so that product, development, and IT operations teams share ownership of the software delivery pipeline and treat it as a product.
- Create an environment where teams can easily collect data on delivery performance metrics and KPIs, capture workflow bottlenecks, and focus on the value and quality of what they ship.
- Continuously require teams to scrutinize their value streams and set short-term goals to address the biggest bottlenecks first.
- Build a culture across the entire organization anchored in one mindset: continuously disrupting your own processes before a competitor does it for you.
9. Remember That “Continuous” Is the Keyword
Eran Kinsbruner, Director and Lead Software Evangelist, Perfecto
DevOps, at its core, means having a fully automated workflow for delivering software — and that cannot happen without mature automation. Kinsbruner emphasizes the importance of the three Cs working in harmony:
- Continuous Integration (CI): Developers integrate code changes frequently, with each change verified by an automated build and test sequence.
- Continuous Testing (CT): Automated testing is not a gate at the end of a pipeline but a layer woven throughout it, validating quality at every stage.
- Continuous Delivery (CD): Every code change that passes CI and CT is in a deployable state and can be released to production reliably and repeatedly.
The key to success is a mature Continuous Testing practice that acts as the connective tissue between CI and CD — running automatically for every code change, every day. Without it, the pipeline stalls and the promise of fast, reliable delivery goes unmet.
Putting It All Together
These nine tips share a common thread: lasting DevOps transformation is a leadership and cultural challenge as much as a technical one. Shared accountability, clear communication, measured progress, product thinking, balanced skills, pragmatic momentum, organizational energy, inclusive change, and relentless automation all reinforce each other. Strong DevOps leaders address all of these dimensions simultaneously rather than treating any single one as the silver bullet.
Original insights sourced from the Enterprisers Project.