A DevOps Transformation Roadmap: What to Know & Do
A DevOps roadmap is a software development plan that covers the entire DevOps lifecycle.
In action, it’s a plan of the means and methods to meet an organization’s DevOps objectives and goals.
A DevOps transformation plan is a valuable tool because it becomes an exhaustive guide to planning the transformation process.
Using a transformation roadmap ensures that the entire DevOps team is on the same page with managing priorities and timelines as you go through your DevOps transformation journey.
DevOps Transformation: A Step-by-Step Guide
There are some general steps that are important to follow when creating a DevOps transformation roadmap.
Step 1: Identify Your Needs
The first step in creating a successful DevOps transformation is to evaluate your current operations and identify your goals and needs.
In order to create achievable goals for your DevOps adoption, it’s important to have an in-depth understanding of your current DevOps process and how it affects your business.
Many businesses aren’t clear on their needs, so our DevOps methodology starts with a discussion about your business goals and analyzing your current systems and DevOps practices.
Step 3: Make a Plan
Business objectives should drive your DevOps transformation plans.
It’s important to pay attention to factors that will impact your entire system and the influences those will have on your business goals, i.e., software delivery, deployment frequency, and ultimately customer satisfaction.
When creating goals for your plan, you should focus on medium- and short-term business goals. These are best to include because they’re achievable and help you work through the roadmap.
As you create your DevOps transformation plan, you can use these business goals to plan stages of progressive improvements for your DevOps implementation.
Step 4: Create a Team
Before you can implement your transformation roadmap, you need a DevOps team to execute your plans.
Your team should comprise individuals with a deep understanding of DevOps culture and DevOps principles who are capable of successfully leading your development process.
Putting a team together by yourself can be complicated, especially if you’re unfamiliar with DevOps and aren’t sure what kinds of experts you should be looking for.
By outsourcing your DevOps transformation roadmap to a trusted and reliable company like OpSourced, you avoid having to put together a DevOps team yourself.
Step 5: Choose the Appropriate Tools
Using the correct tools in your DevOps transformation process is a crucial step.
You should select DevOps and automation tools that meet your needs and are compatible with your current system, workflows, and software development process.
It's also helpful to evaluate your current tooling to ensure they’re the right tool, rather than just sticking with DevOps tools you or your team may be familiar with.
If tooling isn’t done correctly, you could run into issues with things not working properly, limiting productivity & scalability, or not functioning to the level that you need.
Step 6: Prioritize Short-Term Goals
Prioritizing shorter-term goals encourages an organizational culture of deploying important projects quickly.
Using short-term goals allows you to focus on different tasks at a time and creates more flexibility in executing and implementing your plan.
This is a great way to start your transformation and see results quickly.
Step 7: Automate Your Infrastructure
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD) will automate your infrastructure and help ensure that your business maintains operations to meet changing needs while conserving the same quality and embracing a culture of continuous improvement.
Infrastructure automation can be integrated with CI/CD approaches to address deployment-related issues.
If you work with OpSourced to outsource the creation of your transformation roadmap, our team will handle these steps with your input and guide you through creating the right DevOps transformation strategy for your business.
2 Common Problems & How We Avoid Them
There are a variety of common problems that can arise when creating and implementing a DevOps transformation roadmap.
Through our many years as a DevOps agency, we have fine-tuned our roadmap creation and integration process to avoid these easy-to-make issues.
Problem #1: Failure to Communicate
A common problem while working on a roadmap for adopting DevOps is the lack of communication between key stakeholders. This could present itself in various ways.
The most common thing we’ve seen is development and operations teams not being on the same page about the roadmap. Other communication issues commonly arise when it comes to priorities and action items.
OpSourced strives to avoid these issues by creating a DevOps implementation plan that allows for constant communication on the project to address problems or changes as they may arrive.
An important part of our process is communicating about business goals and needs before we begin to avoid miscommunications before they start.
Before we begin working on your roadmap, we create a shared Slack channel so our engineers can coordinate with your team in real-time.
Using a Slack channel allows you to get updates on your project as they happen. This also gives you easier access to communicate with our engineers so you can start getting in touch about changing or shifting your needs or goals as soon as they change.
Problem #2: Lack of Clarity in Prioritizing Goals
This is another common issue we see within DevOps teams when implementing DevOps. Different people may have different opinions on goal priorities, which can cause confusion and disrupt the smooth implementation of the roadmap.
When it comes to DevOps transformation goals, we at OpSourced completely hand that over to you.
All goals and prioritizations are based on what you think is best for your business.
We can help guide you through understanding the impact of different decisions and provide the expert information you need to make the right decisions for your goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a DevOps transformation plan?
A DevOps transformation plan is a valuable tool because it becomes an exhaustive guide to planning the transformation process. Using a transformation roadmap ensures that the entire DevOps team is on the same page with managing priorities and timelines as you go through your DevOps transformation journey.
In closing
Creating a roadmap for your DevOps journey is a good move for a business because it clearly outlines your goals and plans with actionable steps to reach those goals.
It’s also a great way to ensure that your entire team knows your current objectives and where you are in achieving them.
Outsourcing the creation and implementation of your DevOps implementation roadmap is a great way to not only save you time and money but also accelerate software delivery and DevOps automation.
Not only do you avoid the stress of hiring an entire team individually, but you also get to work with a team of reliable DevOps engineers that have experience working together to create and execute roadmaps.
Working with OpSourced gives you the experience and personal care of working with an engineer as a full-time employee without the stress of hiring an entire team.
We have over 15 years of experience and can work on DevOps projects of all shapes and sizes with any tech stack or hosting preference. Contact us today to start your DevOps transformation roadmap journey.