Reviving a stalled DevOps initiative - Tracey Barrett, DevOpsDays Chicago 2025

DevOps is more than a technology initiative; it’s a change initiative - and far too often, these stall inside large organizations. Good intentions up front are lost among deadline pressure, competing priorities or simple resistance to change. How can you recapture momentum and encourage continuous improvement?

This talk will explore techniques and case studies for reigniting DevOps initiatives so that your organization can finally make the progress it needs.

Transcript

1. Reviving a Stalled DevOps Initiative D e v O p s D a y s March 18, 2025
2. Tracey Barrett SVP, Products & Services tbarrett@nvisia.com 2001 Introduced OOAD, RUP, Java and unit testing to COBOL programmers. 2004 First use of Scrum, continuous integration and test coverage tools. 2007 SOA, automated deployment, ops feedback to dev, EA process tuning. 2011 Introduced agile and devops techniques in support of major mobile initiative. 2012 Process rollout includes policy and procedures to support government audit. 2013 TDD, Database as code, OSGi 2015 First Docker deployment to AWS cloud
4. DevOps + Platform Customer + User Experience AI, ML + Data Software Product Development Here’s what we do. In every category, we have: ▪ Experts and advisory services to help you plan ▪ Case studies to demonstrate experience ▪ Intellectual property to jumpstart efforts ▪ Product partnerships & certified consultants ▪ Events, training & thought leadership
5. Who are you?
6. Who works someplace where DevOps feels stalled?
8. Plan for Today’s Talk ▪ Top reasons I see DevOps initiatives stall ▪ How the latest approaches avoid these issues ▪ Advice for regaining momentum
9. Top 3 Reasons Why do initiatives stall?
10. Your original initiative was a “DevOps project” – designed to end. 1
11. Exploring the issue ▪ The project ends and is not funded in following budget cycles. ▪ You are in a company with project based funding. ▪ It probably happens annually. ▪ Any tools or budget you might need can be difficult to get approved. ▪ The projects that get funded are very beholden to their objectives, with little room for team-inspired improvement initiatives.
12. 2 You lost momentum as business features were prioritized over improvement initiatives.
13. Exploring the issue ▪ Product teams have improvement initiatives and other technical debt on the same backlog as business features. ▪ For each individual improvement, the business / product owner is weighing the value vs a business request.
14. 3 One of the teams that was needed didn’t get on board.
15. Exploring the issue ▪ Resource constraints ▪ Skill constraints ▪ Cognitive load issues ▪ Collaboration issues & the natural animosities of interdependent teams
16. A new approach …and how it avoids the stall
17. My long-held, personal view of DevOps Apply agile thinking at every step. CULTURE MEASUREMENT AUTOMATION SHARING ▪ Identify work and measure the end-to-end time to complete it. ▪ Performance tune the workflow of each stage in the process. ▪ Remove delays in handing off work to the next station. ▪ Prevent rework by improving quality at each step. ▪ Identify and prevent distractions, a.k.a. unplanned work. ▪ Align each department’s projects to business priorities. A form of Lean process improvement
18. nvisia-confidential | 18 That’s still my view, but…
19. nvisia-confidential | 19 It doesn’t really tell you how to do it.
20. An approach to realize DevOps https://www.nvisia.com/insights/platform-engineering-an-agile-product-driven-model-for-cloud-native-success
21. Team Topologies ▪ Four team types: ▪ Stream-aligned team ▪ Enabling team ▪ Complicated subsystem team ▪ Platform team
22. Platform Team ▪ Agile Product Management is a key aspect of the team
23. Platform Team ▪ Model external team engagement after collaborative EA / solution architect approach
24. nvisia-confidential | 24 How does this approach avoid the stall?
25. Your original initiative was a “DevOps project” – designed to end. 1
26. 2 You lost momentum as business features were prioritized over improvement initiatives.
27. 3 One of the teams that was needed didn’t get on board.
28. Restarting Momentum Change is hard, but let’s do it anyway.
31. If you have the authority… ▪ Identify the team size your organization is willing to commit to continuous improvement in a Platform Team ▪ Staff the team with a Product Manager, and cross-functional engineers to build your DevOps and Cloud infrastructure ▪ Empower the team! Hold them accountable for collaboration.
32. If you have responsibility… ▪ Influence those in authority ▪ Win over the authority and the people they listen to ▪ Make smaller improvements to restart momentum ▪ Reach across the aisle to find like-minded peers in other areas ▪ Make tool requests ▪ Report out metrics in your sprint review ▪ Connect with groups similar to yours to identify and share where you are having similar problems
34. Thank you! Keep the conversation going: tbarrett@nvisia.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/traceycbarrett/ https://www.meetup.com/Milwaukee-Agile/ Tracey Barrett SVP, Products & Services tbarrett@nvisia.com Stop by the nvisia booth with comments and questions!