Silos and poor communication still hamper DevOps, warns XebiaLabs' Rob Vanstone

Focus on your ultimate goals, rather than on DevOps, advises Vanstone

Silos, poor communications and inadequate hand-offs between different teams remain some of the biggest challenges for the development of DevOps within organisations, XebiaLabs' technical director UK Rob Vanstone has warned.

Speaking at the Computing DevOps Live event in London today, Vanstone suggested that DevOps initiatives often get bogged down in the minutiae of DevOps, and that the ultimate goals behind DevOps-driven projects therefore get forgotten.

Asked about some of the most common causes of DevOps projects going awry, Vanstone said: "It's communication. Despite the name, the ideals and the goals of DevOps, breaking down silos and getting people working together [remains challenging] and there's still a lot of hand-off of information between teams. That hand-off of information between teams is where delay really happens.

"It might be that we are parcelling up a whole ‘bunch' of changes that one team understands, but then someone else also needs to understand that change in order to be able to deliver it to an environment. It's that hand-off that, for me, is the biggest challenge."

As ever, said Vanstone, clear communication remains key to the smooth delivery of IT projects.

"Breaking down those silos and making the lines of communication smoother is a huge journey, and it starts at the top," added Vanstone.

It requires the right structure within the organisation that empowers people, creating a cooperative environment rather than encouraging people to only care about their particular job, team or specific project.

"[You've] got to really structure your organisation as efficiently as possible so you can get people working together, solving problems and getting releases in front of ‘customers'," explained Vanstone.

Ultimately, Vanstone said, it's not necessarily or solely about developer autonomy, but about teams understanding what is being delivered and the purpose of releases and projects.

Analysing pipelines and what they are doing should reveal where DevOps projects are fragile, "and where it's fragile is where you start to solve the problem".

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