So you’ve been hearing more and more about the DevOps movement lately, but you aren’t sure if it’s right for your organization or even what all the fuss is all about. We asked Gene Kim, co-author of "The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" and the upcoming "The DevOps Cookbook" to share some practical tips for learning more about DevOps and putting it to work in your organization. Here’s what he said:

First things first: Read up on DevOps

“I believe the best way for an IT leader to determine whether they have problems that DevOps can help solve is to read the free 170-page excerpt of 'The Phoenix Project' If the problems being described in the book resonate, then DevOps can help. The story in the book represents the common story of our journey in IT when Dev, Test and Ops don't work together, and how we ultimately fail the organizations we serve,” Kim said.

The first half of the "The Phoenix Project" (170 pages) is available at: http://itrevolution.com/the-phoenix-project-excerpt/

What’s next? Prepare to experiment

MIT senior lecturer Dr. Steven Spear studies what makes exceptional organizations stay ahead of the pack and helps companies strengthen their internal operations for improvement and innovation. Kim quotes Spear when he explains the next step:

“Dr. Steven Spear said, ‘For nearly a century, we’ve trained business leaders that we “decide our way to success.”’ In other words, the job of a leader is to decide on the right strategy, decide what work to do, and make people do that work. Dr. Spear and many others assert that this doesn't work. Instead, the job of leaders is to create an environment where everyone is be able to experiment and learn, and then to turn local improvements into global improvements.

So, if a CIO resonates with the problems being described in The Phoenix Project, it suggests that a good next step is to assemble the leadership team, spanning project owners, Dev, Test, Ops, information security, and start the discussion of how they can replicate the outcomes of the DevOps transformation described in the book,” Kim said.

After that: Pick your guinea pig

“If the leadership can agree that they have a business problem that DevOps can help solve, the next step is to identify an area where they can experiment with DevOps work patterns, likely requiring doing things very differently than the way they've done it for years. And that's why I think that the Red Hat Inception Project is so interesting. The team leading a DevOps initiative inside the Red Hat IT group chose very carefully to start with their Enterprise Service Bus. They identified this area as a significant bottleneck in the organization. The benefits of improvement were large enough to make a material contribution to the performance of the organization, and the risk was small enough so that any mistakes wouldn’t actually jeopardize the entire organization,” Kim said.

Finally: Get out of the way

“Once the initial area of focus is selected and scoped appropriately, then usually a dedicated team is created to generate the improvement results. The job of leadership is to remove obstacles for that team, often freeing that group from bureaucracies and standards. But that dedicated team is still held accountable for generating the desired results.

My favorite improvement metric is around ‘lead time’ – in other words, how quickly can the organization go from ‘code committed by development,’ through the testing and deployment cycle, and running successful in production, generating value for the customer.

Why lead time? Lead time is one of the best predictors of quality, customer satisfaction and employee happiness,” Kim said.

Read, "Gene Kim: What high-performing IT organizations do differently."

Gene is a multiple award winning CTO, researcher and author. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written three books, including “The Visible Ops Handbook” and “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win." Gene is a huge fan of IT operations, and how it can enable developers to maximize throughput of features from “code complete” to “in production,” without causing chaos and disruption to the IT environment. He has worked with some of the top Internet companies on improving deployment flow and increasing the rigor around IT operational processes. In 2007, ComputerWorld added Gene to the “40 Innovative IT People Under The Age Of 40” list, and was given the Outstanding Alumnus Award by the Department of Computer Sciences at Purdue University for achievement and leadership in the profession.