Introducing DevOps at Barclays: More of a sales job than a tech intervention

We thought we could change the world by changing tools and we failed, says VP engineering Hardeep Bath

For a large organisation, introducing DevOps is much more of a sales job than it is a technical one. That was the core message of Hardeep Bath, VP head of core engineering, corporate technology, at Barclays.

"Three years ago we had a dream we could change the world with DevOps," he told the audience at the Computing DevOps Summit today. "We had the right vision and the right culture so we would introduce the right tools and we'd change everything. But our dreams came crashing down."

He continued: "We spent the initial three months onboarding people in Jenkins and Jira, hoping that would change the culture, but we failed. Just putting people on different tools won't work."

Central to the initial failure was underestimating the scope of what was required. There were some 600 applications to be transformed across the personal and corporate banking divisions plus another 800 sales side apps that were already there that would need integrating into the whole.

Importantly too, there was an overmighty central business IT structure that dictated how things would be done, plus the usual compliance strictures to which all banks are subject.

There was also a lack of understanding of DevOps and Agile within the business as a whole as well as within the centrailsed IT structure.

"Their ideas of devops weren't same as ours, we had to re-evaluate the situation to take in political power structures and agendas," Bath said.

"We had to educate people what DevOps is and where the value lies. So we held a lot of talks and gave demos, and built out our own internal projects. We had to show internal teams and the business alike, to shift internal ideas, about what ‘good' should look like."

Learning from its shaky start, Bath's team laid off the 60 tools experts it had originally brought in to train people in Chef, Jenkins and Jira, replacing them with experienced engineers. It then built out the APIs to connect applications together and set about creating flexible frameworks for development practices

"The new engineers had the right mindset to really understand the problems. They could innovate to find solutions. That's when we started to turn the corner," Bath said.

Three years later DevOps is now much more accepted at Barclays, although it remains work in progress. While there is still a central DevOps team the overall effort is much less centralised, with flexible but standardised practices being rolled out for different scenarios.

Bath pointed to three pillars for success: building suitable frameworks using cloud and Jenkins; introducing objective metrics; and a strong focus on visualisations, building hooks in Jenkins and outputting metrics on a dashboard.

The latter has been particularly helpful in the continuing job of selling the process to the business, Bath said, as gives all parties one place to go to check application rollouts, performance and usage. It supports the ongoing push to support collaboration and teamworking.

"Our team is now about PR. It's about marketing, accounting, innovation and community building. It's much less about the tools and tech," Bath said.