DevOps for Individuals and Enterprises: Building High-Performing IT Teams

A recent webinar hosted by Helen Beal, head of the ambassador programme at PeopleCert, explored how individuals and teams can use DevOps to build high-performing enterprises.

Helen was joined by Donna Knapp, the ITSM curriculum development manager, Avinash Rao, a digital transformation and enterprise agility leader, and Debashis Bhattacharyya, an expert in applying DevSecOps in the payments and telecoms sector.

Together, the panel discussed the value of continuous learning in the quest for boosting individual performance and developing sustainable careers and took time to explore this in the context of new technologies such as AI, which many companies are experimenting with today.

Using real-world examples, the panellists also brought to life the many ways DevOps has helped them deliver high performance, and the power that incremental changes can have on achieving major transformation, as well as avoid ‘merged hell’.

The panel began by looking at what DevOps means to them.

Defining DevOps: What Does it Mean to You?

Avinash Rao (AR): I think organisations are encountering scenarios where work gets ‘stuck’ between functions and projects are delayed or don’t run smoothly. They need ways to manage intersectional skills to keep things moving. The DevOps movement helps overcome the pain points by bringing different parts of the organisation together to unlock the value chain.

Donna Knapp (DK): When I was doing the DevOps Foundation research, the promise of delivering speed appealed to the lean practices I pursued early on in my career. But what I find exciting about DevOps in today’s world is that you can combine the promise of speed with reliability, quality, resilience and stability. It’s what organisations want. DevOps unlocks ways to have it all.

Debashis Bhattacharyya (DB): When you experience the value that comes with the end-to-end visibility of a project, there is so much you can do across an organisation to create great products. DevOps helps to overcome the hurdles and blockers that projects can encounter. It adds up to happy developers, happy teams and happy customers.

Continuous integration: How to avoid ‘merged hell’ – the notion that bringing components together at the end of a project creates problems that are hard to unpick?

DB: Continuous Integration is a powerful process for ensuring quality throughout product development. No matter who is developing the code, they observe the same standards. It avoids having to deal with lots of problems at the end of the project cycle.

For example, as soon as code is written, it can be checked for high standards of quality. And, if open-source code is used, then software composition scans ensure the code isn’t introducing vulnerabilities. Regular testing at the unit, user acceptance and integration levels help ensure the pieces come together as planned.

Helen Beal (HB): Continuous integration allows you to do continuous delivery because your software is always in a releasable state. It also makes continuous deployment possible: this means the code that passes the tests can be automatically deployed with no manual requirement.

That can be a scary concept for people new to a DevOps world, and it’s why it’s important that individuals have the right skills to apply the organisation’s DevOps frameworks.

DevOps skills: What are the skills people need to draw on to make the performance leap?

DK: People need to understand the different tools and practices and how they deliver value. With a good grounding in these, you can find ways to deliver faster. Don’t forget DevOps’ roots are in agile and lean, which advocate for small chunks of work and continuous delivery. Very small changes, done very quickly, bring big advantages to organisations.

AR: You also need to have a mindset that aligns to what the organisation wants to achieve. When you have this, small and fast make sense.

For example, in the e-commerce space, responding to customer behaviour is paramount. Fast delivery, fast fixes, and fast changes are essential. Agile is about effective process, whereas lean is about being efficient. DevOps uses these together – it’s a shift in emphasis, but worthwhile.

DB: Understanding the principles of people, process and technology is a good starting point for anyone doing this for the first time. People need to be top of the list for a reason: 90% of people who are successful have strong soft skills in collaboration, problem solving and so on. These are all traits of successful DevOps organisations.

Real-world examples: delivering high performance and better outcomes

AR: In regulated industries, security can be seen as hindering speed. But it’s no longer a case of technology or tools holding companies back; it’s the way people think about the entire flow. There will be some tension between needing commonality in tools but there also needs to be a balance in how specific teams apply them.

HB: In one small credit card company I worked for, it could take up to six weeks to resolve security issues. However, when we included a security expert in the cross-skilled team of IT operations, development, and testing, we were able to shift from weeks to hours.

80% of the problems were coming from 20% of the work. The transference of knowledge that came from blending skills in the team was a big factor in uncovering this insight and achieving higher performance.

DK: I think DevOps has had a profound influence on ITSM. There’s no longer change advisory boards or a three-tier hierarchy for incident management, for instance. Things get done faster without constraint and to a better standard. People are discovering you can have it all.

DB: A large project I worked on used a centre of excellence to create a set of tools to drive cost savings, remove complexity, overcome silos and introduce standardisation. This helped with defining the process and, when it was coupled with performance and security testing, automation, and applying a value chain.

We also added performance measurement to track progress. We achieved a 70% improvement in time to market completion, a 20% reduction in cost, and a 19% reduction in deployment time.

Career development: If you’re just beginning or transitioning to DevOps, what should you be thinking about?

AR: At an organisational level, consider how DevOps will help you make continuous improvement. My advice is to start small and incorporate the improvements so they become a natural part of the pipeline.

HB: Organisational models should guide your approach: make sure the flow is optimised from left to right and you don’t create silos that encourage waste.

DB: Sharing the vision and then tasking teams to achieve an outcome together works well. It fosters collaboration, and the good practices of DevOps will come through. You can then build on this and introduce automation.

DK: For individuals, a sustainable career will come from learning about the frameworks and the adjacent ones, so you can guide change. Also, think about working in other business units to understand why things need to be done.

DevOps in the context of AI:

DK: One area of change is in the production of documentation and developing knowledge management. It’s helping teams track rapid and numerous changes and keep resources up to date. Agentic AI is automating tasks and freeing people to be creative and think about how the business achieves its goals and stays competitive.

AR: I think companies will be able to operate at a new level of speed and accuracy. I see it being used to create feedback loops for improvement. We’ll be using it for real-time insight and acting on it.

DB: I think AI is the answer to closing the skills gap that some teams face when it comes to the development of code.

Key takeaways for career development

AR: New capability is becoming available, not just tools. It’s a great time to consider how you’ll use that in your career and deliver value.

DB: DevOps isn’t optional. It’s foundational for staying relevant in the industry. The jobs that pay the most today didn’t exist a few years ago, so take that as a cue for shaping your career.

DK: I’m a big advocate for lifelong learning. I say channel your inner child – ask ‘why’ more. Don’t be scared about having knowledge gaps; use it as the motivation to learn new things. It will pay off.