How to Make Your DevOps Team More Effective

There are several factors to consider making your DevOps team more effective. Although many articles do let you know some of these factors, they often don’t offer specific advice.

Instead, they tend to generalize things like saying, “You should build a solid team,” but don’t really tell you straightforward ways to do this specifically.

In this article, we’ll introduce to you some proven DevOps team development tactics. By the end of reading this, you should feel confident and clued up on how you can make your team successful.

Don’t Forget Retention

Before you go on a hiring spree to grow your DevOps team, it’s critical to understand a fundamental reality about team building. That is, retention is just as vital as recruitment.

Most sales professionals know that acquiring a new customer is a lot harder than keeping an existing one – especially if they are valuable. When it comes to putting together productive teams, the same idea applies.

Keeping and training existing talent is much less expensive than recruiting new talent.

Don’t underestimate the power of identifying internal talent that can contribute to a freshly formed team. Then you’ll gain not only from cost savings but also from the company’s expertise that these internally sourced employees can bring to the table right away.

Pay Attention to DevOps Team Structure

It’s easy to believe that you can only attain DevOps perfection with an entirely new set of skills from outsiders.

Managers don’t often consider the importance of how teams are put together. Instead, they tend to focus on the characters within the teams, which often causes failure.

Keep in mind that designing a team is important, but going by traditional team structures might not cut it. Job titles shouldn’t matter.

What’s more important is that everyone knows their level of responsibility and what they have to do. Then you’ll have a pure DevOps team structure to work with.

We should mention all team members should be held accountable for security. DevSecOps can help you with this.

Take the Amazon Approach

If a system works well for another company, it’s got to be worth thinking about for yours. Even very small elements of the other company’s approach might work for your company.

Amazon has developed a “two-pizza team” approach for their DevOps teams. The idea is that the team size is small enough so that two pizzas can feed them all. It’s a way of saying keep your DevOp teams small and focused.

What Amazon stumbled upon is that smaller team structures are better for high-performing DevOps businesses. This type of setup allows teams to successfully adhere to the loosely connected, microservices model of software delivery.

At first, reducing team sizes to become smaller might sound pretty daunting for your business.

One solid approach to doing this is to go with a portfolio-style team design. This means there’s a mixture of different roles working within the team. And then when they are in these small portfolio-style teams, assigning specific agendas and tasks they have to fulfill.

You’ll be surprised when you look at the bigger picture of how efficient this methodology can be.

Have the Best Tools You Can Get

If you want to attract some of the best DevOps talents, understand they enjoy working with cutting-edge technology.

In an organization that relies on an outdated, slow-functioning toolchain to produce software, it’s going to be much more challenging to recruit and keep the best of the best.

Talented employees’ thinking will be: why should I have put up with this useless tech when I can go elsewhere and have high-end tech somewhere else?

Investing in DevOps tools will not only make your employees more productive but will also encourage them to stay with the company.

Get Respected Mentors Onboard

Recruits aren’t only looking for the latest tech to play with. They also want to know that they’ll be working with respected individuals, especially if they work beneath them.

But mentors don’t have to be upper management to attract new talent. It could be much more of a draw if a recruit knows that their team leader is someone who could mentor them. This is because the recruit will have a chance to work with the particular individual they respect.

You may have talented individuals already onboard that could make great mentors. If so, help develop them into their own brand and gain a reputation outside the company. See it as creating a company asset, and of course, reward these individuals enough to stay with you once they gain momentum.

Find Grass Roots Talent

One straightforward way of finding new and emerging talent is to teach DevOps at a university. Or, at least contact universities and try to arrange workshops or other forms of interacting with students.

By doing this, you’ll get exposure to talented individuals that other firms have no clue about.

Team Autonomy DevOps

Giving existing team members more say in forming individual teams is one way to put together high-performing teams.

Self-selection of teams might make it easier for your company to build coalitions with a spark! This is because you allow team members to work together on a professional and social basis.

By allowing teams to select their members, they can determine who they want to work with. It makes sense that a solid collection of individuals who enjoy working together can tackle almost any project.

Develop Your DevOps Team Wisely

There are many other points we could run through about developing your DevOps team. However, we focused on some of the critical areas managers may overlook and follow the standard model of doing things.

Hopefully, now, you’ll have some inspiration to get your DevOps team running at full clout!

Thanks for stopping by, and good luck! Also, please consider checking out some of our other helpful blog posts.