How Do You Sell DevOps Adoption in Your Organisation?
International DevOps Certification Academy™
15 October 2023
DevOps Adoption
DevOps Change Management
DevOps for Big Corporations
Our typical approach is to present organisational and moral benefits of DevOps. How instantly DevOps would enhance our teams and excel the interactions within our organisation and with our client ecosystem. How wonderfully our companies would serve customer-oriented products and services.
Is this really the correct approach? Is it better to highlight benefits of adopting DevOps or the cost of not adopting?
The answer is: It depends.
According to Peter Salovey who is the originator of emotional intelligence, your approach to drive organisational and operational changes associated with DevOps adoption must depend on whether your organisation perceives DevOps as safe or risky.
Scenario-1: Your organisation thinks DevOps is safe
If your organisation thinks DevOps is safe, first of all let us congratulate you to be part of such an open-minded culture in your organisation. The ones among us who experienced multiple DevOps transformation and adoption projects would say that your job to adopt DevOps is mostly done. But don’t quickly relax. You still need to work hard to emphasise all the good things that will happen if your organisation adopts DevOps. They will want to act immediately to obtain those benefits.
Scenario-2: Your organisation thinks DevOps is risky
When your organisation believes that DevOps is risky, don’t get worried. You are among most of us. Don’t forget that your approach with Scenario-1 alone does no longer work. Your organisation is now comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of DevOps adoption aren’t sufficiently attractive to take action. There is no point to deny the risks as they are usually rooted from the belief systems and long term experiences.
Instead, you need to shake the status quo to destabilise it and accentuate the bad things that will happen, the opportunities that will be lost if they don’t adopt DevOps. Taking a risk is always more attractive when they are faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t take the risk. The prospect of a certain loss will create a sense of urgency, make your organisation take action, invest resources to understand the benefits of DevOps and ultimately adopt it. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always one step at a time.
Conclusion:
If you have ever been curious why it was so challenging for some organisations to adopt DevOps, you may have an opinion now. Corporations and established organisations are risk averse entities and they usually fit to Scenario-2. You can’t sell them DevOps adoption by solely focusing on the benefits they would get from DevOps. They won’t buy your idea because DevOps is not a Sprint (metaphorically and literally) to get major quick wins. DevOps is a marathon and it is a journey to build great products and services to satisfy your clients and flourish your business.
You need to make your organisation face: Things may look OK today, but they are not. You need to make this a joint responsibility in your organisation to avoid the guaranteed loss without DevOps.
We would like to hear your own opinions, experiences and tactics how you managed to sell DevOps in your organisations and to your clients. Not only the success stories, but also the valuable hard lessons you have learnt!
Please join the discussion below and share your input with your DevOps community!
All the Best and Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoyed it...
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