If you are an organization serious about competing in the cloud and container native era, you must be taking steps to embrace DevOps. However most of the focus on DevOps is around cultural change and many organizations start off without taking a holistic look. This results in project failures or sub-optimal ROI. In this post, I want to highlight some of the factors that lead to failure of DevOps initiatives in various enterprises.

Lack of trust: This clearly ties into the cultural change everyone is talking about. Lack of trust can be due to various factors including half baked efforts to bring in cultural change to non alignment of goals among various stakeholders to lack of metrics based insights identifying friction points, leading to finger pointing among various stakeholders

Islands of automation: Automation is clearly the core mantra for organizations modernizing themselves in the cloud era but most of them end up with islands of automation, leading to friction along the software delivery pipeline. Such islands of automation delivers sub optimal benefits impacting the competitiveness of the IT organization

Lack of tool choice:Some organizations embark on their DevOps journey by forcing their developers and operations into using a specific platform and tools associated with the platform. This creates tremendous friction for the stakeholders leading to project failures. Any forced change in the toolset of DevOps stakeholders adds friction that nullifies any benefits from the cultural change brought inside the organization

Lack of feedback loop: The success of any DevOps initiative hinges on creating a continuous feedback loop connecting all the stakeholders involved in the process. Most DevOps efforts are built around silo-ed metrics and monitoring instead of building a feedback loop that layers on the delivery pipeline proving continuous actionable feedback. This is one of the biggest reasons for failure of DevOps initiatives

Lack of visibility: Even with enhanced automation and monitoring as a part of DevOps initiatives, most of the organizations have their teams working in silos. As it is a case in large organizations, big projects have multiple teams working towards the same goal. However, teams are working in silos because there is no seamless way in which they can keep track of progress and collaborate more effectively with each other. This leads to severe slowdowns, leading to sub-optimal DevOps benefits. In many organizations, executives have limited visibility over various projects and teams. They come to know about the success or failure of any project at much later stage. This impacts organization’s ability to evolve and meet the business demands

DevOps is a buzzword getting the attention of many enterprises globally. But very little attention is given to the details in developing and executing a DevOps strategy. In this post, I have highlighted some of the pitfalls large organizations need to take into account before they embark on their agile transformation journey.