Why is DevOps so hard to get right?

DevOps is not a technology. It’s not a title. It’s not even a CI/CD Pipeline. No, it’s not just some buzzword the industry has created that’s equivalent to “automation.” It is a real thing and businesses are doing it.

DevOps is a culture that encourages collaborations among all stakeholders including development and operations teams and the improvement of processes through automation to increase the quality and speed of software delivery.

Culture, the keyword that many in the industry forget. Without a culture of collaboration, with a culture of empathy, without a culture of innovation, without a culture that is blameless, DevOps will never thrive.

Building a DevOps Culture

Edgar Shein at MIT Sloan developed the concept of organizational culture around the middle of the 20th century. The idea that a group of people working together in a corporate environment could create a culture distinct from the greater societal culture is now fairly well accepted in many industries. IBM and Boeing are well known for having cultural characteristics that separate them from competitors, for better or for worse.

Groups of people create a culture through shared values and behaviors. How we reward behaviors, how we treat those values as malleable or immutable affects how strong the organization’s…