Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Devops Teams

By Author: Joseph Mathew
Total Articles: 11
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Stephen Covey – the author of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” passed away this week. To honor his contribution to professional development, I’ve tailored his Seven Habits to make them relevant to DevOps teams.

1. Be proactive

If you just let things happen to you, you spend your whole day dealing with angry users and triaging performance problems. You can only be proactive in Ops if you have enough visibility into your applications. Having visibility puts you in control and allows you to be proactive.

2. Begin with the end in mind

Define what success is and what impact you want to have on your organization. Go beyond uptime and availability measures and think about how your work can contribute to the company’s bottom line. Thinking in these terms will help you better align with your Line-of-Business people as well as improve job satisfaction.

3. Put first things first

Prioritize tasks based on importance, rather than urgency. It is an easy trap to “live in your inbox.” Try using Covey’s matrix to prioritize tasks that are both urgent and important. Also, the ...
... right server monitoring tools can help prioritize what will have the most impact on the success of your application.

4. Think win-win

Find out what matters to your Dev and LOB counterparts and how they measure success. Then your goals and objectives with theirs and build a plan to get there. Successful DevOps shops pick shared goals and then align their efforts to achieve them. When everyone is committed to the same goals, conflict disappears.

5. Think first to understand, then to be understood

Most DevOps teams code the apps they’re responsible for, and this makes managing them difficult. On top of that, if their organization is agile, it’s often impossible to know how it has changed each time, or to do proper application performance tuning. The right performance monitoring tools can help by automatically discovering what has changed. Once they have this understanding they’re in a better position to know what’s performing poorly and how to fix it.

6. Synergize

Often we hear Dev & Ops folks talk about the “blame game” that goes on inside their companies. If the culture in your organization emphasizes finger-pointing over collaboration, something needs to change. The DevOps movement has some good materials on how to enact a cultural change to enhance collaboration and teamwork.

7. Sharpen your saw

Continually look for ways to improve yourself. Often in operations this means taking on new skills and becoming application experts, which can lead to better job satisfaction. I hear a new pride when they say they are “Ops people who can code” or “Ops people who can troubleshoot App issues better than their peers.”

In the end, the habits of highly effective DevOps teams require a range of skills that include effective relationship management, goal alignment across teams, time management, and continuous improvement.