How to create an IT Org Chart for Modern DevOps Org Chart Software

Treat the tools and processes as a project, probably maintained by a team that can focus on the pipeline as a product. Separate the development and maintenance work being performed on the pipeline from the production pipelines being used by the other teams. Many people see DevOps as simply development and operations working cohesively and collaborating together. Just as important is for operations teams to understand the desire of development teams to reduce deployment time and time to market.

• Platform teams create capabilities that can be used by numerous stream-aligned teams, with little overhead.
• A professional manager’s job is to build a team with a strong mix of skills with overlap while keeping the team as small as possible.
• In reality, a combination of more than one structure, or one structure transforming into another, is often the best approach.
• The Spotify Model fosters collaboration, autonomy, and a shared sense of purpose by enabling squads to work independently while still maintaining alignment with the organization’s broader goals.

By defining clear roles and fostering a sense of shared ownership, organizations can ensure that team members understand their responsibilities and contribute effectively to the team’s objectives. Quality assurance engineers play a crucial role in ensuring that applications are built to meet specified functionality and performance requirements. They design and execute test plans to validate application functionality and performance. Jez Humble, a pioneer in the DevOps movement, stated that “testing is not a phase or a gate, but a continuous process integrated into the entire software delivery lifecycle” (Humble & Farley, 2010).

How to adopt DevOps

This can be achieved through a variety of ways, such as using Docker Hub or other services. Organizations must build the DevOps team structure necessary to evangelize and implement key DevOps practices. Agile methodologies are immensely popular in the software industry since they empower teams to be inherently flexible, well-organized, and capable of responding to change.

Senior leadership will need to buy into this process before it can be implemented successfully. If you want continuous delivery or cross specific teams within an organization. They don’t set themselves up for success by first identifying their true needs ahead of time. The people devops organization structure who are in support roles should not be seen as “less than” but rather bring valuable insights into what is happening within your product development process. Support staff can provide up-to-date insight into how well products are functioning based on customer feedback.

DevSecOps, BizOps, and others

DevOps aligns development and operations to optimize quality and delivery. Time is running out to make an IT organizational structure that can meet the constant “ideate-build-run” iterations of modern development operations (DevOps). Lastly, as DevOps practices scale across the organization, it is important to measure success and demonstrate the value of the transformation. By collecting and analyzing metrics related to development velocity, quality, and customer satisfaction, organizations can track progress and demonstrate the tangible benefits of adopting DevOps practices.

Evidently, somethings developers typically won’t hear until it’s too late, if they don’t have any other source of input from those that are actually using their products day to day. This also applies when working across the team’s discipline-specific knowledge. Therefore, DevOps should have the opportunity to hear what’s happening on the design and production side to maintain the DevOps organization structure.

Agile & DevOps

Applications like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are also necessary for teams to communicate quickly and efficiently, especially in a remote-first world. In the past, a developer could walk over to the operations team to ask about the status of an incident. Now virtual communication apps provide that same instantaneous communication.

While the actual work a team performs daily will dictate the DevOps toolchain, you will need some type of software to tie together and coordinate the work between your team and the rest of the organization. Jira is a powerful tool that plans, tracks, and manages software development projects, keeping your immediate teammates and the extended organization in the loop on the status of your work. Another ingredient for success is a leader willing to evangelize DevOps to a team, collaborative teams, and the organization at large. The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches. Keep in mind, the team structures below take different forms depending on the size and maturity of a company.

Qualities of a DevOps team

No two organizations are alike and that means taking someone else’s system wholesale and applying it to your team isn’t a guarantee of success. The beauty of DevOps and Agile is that they encourage experimentation and enable rapid changes to be made. Take advantage of this expectation of DevOps and make sure to embrace new ideas at least for a short testing period to see what works best for you. This gives stream-aligned teams time to acquire and evolve capabilities without taking time away from their primary goals. The enabling team seeks to primarily increase the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by growing their capabilities with a focus on problems, rather than solutions.

This book provides a starting point for how Atlassian thinks about teams. Rather than reiterate their findings, we want to share our own perspective on the team types. Engineering teams are required to move faster than ever to deliver value to their customers.

More on DevOps teams

Another key aspect of scaling DevOps is adopting organization-wide tools and processes. This may include shared CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration platforms, or a unified monitoring and logging solution. By standardizing tools and processes across teams, organizations can ensure consistency and streamline collaboration. DevOps is the confluence of development and operations but is more than the sum of its parts. Specifically, DevOps is a system for software development that focuses on creating an ongoing feedback loop of analyzing, building and testing while leveraging automation to speed up the entire process. To achieve this kind of seamless and constant loop of software building and testing, you need to create teams of cross-functional disciplines that work in concert.

Platform teams create capabilities that can be used by numerous stream-aligned teams, with little overhead. By optimizing a product, platform teams minimize resources and cognitive loads of the stream-aligned team. This also benefits end-users too, since platform teams can create a cohesive experience that spans across different user experiences or products.

1.3. Focusing on Customer Needs and Delivering Value Quickly

And as companies seek to be quicker in responding to evolving customer needs as well as fend off disruptors, the need to better manage the end-to-end product lifecycle has become a crucial differentiator. Their work is a must-read for anyone who’s trying to figure out which DevOps structure is best for their company. The right DevOps team will serve as the backbone of the entire effort and will model what success looks like to the rest of the organization. There is no “one size fits all” however – each team will be different depending on needs and resources.