Establishing a DevOps Centre of Excellence

DevOps Flow is best implemented through establishing a DevOps Centre of Excellence, a central structure that can facilitate the adoption of industry best practices that drive efficiency and the embracing of Cloud practices.

This can act as a catalyst for training, knowledge transfer and cultural shift assistance for your teams and accelerate faster business innovation and reduced time-to-market through high-performance DevOps teams.

Transformation Roadmap

The first step is a maturity assessment to map where your organisation currently stands and from that plan a roadmap for moving forward.

DevOps.com offers an article that explores the types of challenges the process will face, made up of three main elements: organisation structure, legacy technology stack and culture.

They observe a common pattern many organizations will begin with, that typically there are several small DevOps programs already in place in silos that lack the maturity to scale to the enterprise level. Therefore one of the first primary steps and critical success factors is that it is championed at the senior executive level and be chartered as an enterprise-wide program.

Following on the program governance should reflect this ambition, this is the most important step to make an impact on the culture of the organisation. Roles and responsibilities will change and this should be guided by a holistic understanding of the collaboration needed across different business units. KPIs must shift from individual metrics to holistic customer business outcomes.

For an overall set up process InformationWeek defines a four-step approach:

1. Assemble a team – Build the required mix of team, who can define the core body of knowledge, engage stakeholders and train new recruits.
2. Create a knowledge and learning hub – The DevOps Center of Excellence should define the organisation’s best practices and teach these policies and procedures to all practitioners.
3. Define the toolset – Define what the standard DevOps toolset is across the organisation and monitor teams to ensure they are adhering to that standard.
4. Let automation drive DevOps – The DevOps Center of Excellence should always be exploring how to further automation can improve DevOps procedures. The team needs to stay abreast of the latest advancements in the space and continually ask how they can make the process more efficient, more secure and more reliable through automation.

The Enterprisers also offers four points, that take an action-oriented implementation perspective. For example, the first task is to choose the right use cases, identifying where it will have the most impact, and through the next three steps continue this emphasis on the importance of a business-aligned COE, with clearly defined business outcomes, such as increased flexibility or cost savings.