The popularity of DevOps is driven by the ability to enable leaner and agile processes with high-quality releases and faster time-to-market. However, one often hears accounts of DevOps implementations failing to deliver on their promised value.

While enhanced software delivery is important for organizations today, some key factors can cause DevOps implementations to fail. Some of them include:

1. Unstable infrastructure
   Many organizations embark on DevOps programs assuming that merely onboarding automated tools will fast-track how business requirements are pushed into code releases. While tools and automation are needed, these cannot fix the inherent limitations of legacy infrastructure. In fact, traditional organizations with archaic home-grown infrastructure often struggle with sharing limited resources between development, operations, and testing teams.
   
   In such cases, the cloud is the best-fit solution to address the challenges of stable, scalable, and highly available infrastructure. Despite scalability and provisioning benefits, a public cloud poses concerns for financial organizations, which are grappling with stringent regulations and data security issues. Thus, choosing the right infrastructure is crucial as a first step to enabling DevOps.
   
2. Poor collaboration
   DevOps is more than just transferring code from one team to the next. It requires a distinct approach rooted in collaboration. It is about aligning business and IT for better outcomes.
   
   Consider how financial organizations utilize trade, foreign exchange, or wealth management platforms to offer services to their clients. They compete aggressively by rolling out new features and benefits to attract customers. However, without synchrony between the development, business, and operations teams, it is difficult for application owners to quickly adapt to customer needs, release new features, and implement changes, resulting in customer attrition and loss of revenue and market share. 
   
3. Absence of quick wins
   Implementing DevOps can be a tall order, and not all teams are necessarily convinced of the gains at the outset. So, instead of biting off more than one can chew, it helps to start small.
   
   DevOps has the potential to deliver significant business value faster than before. The right strategy demonstrates this at the beginning through pilot runs that leverage “fail fast and fail early” methodologies. This allows teams to see how cloud-enabled infrastructure and collaboration enable agile releases, shorter cycles, and faster time-to-market – all of which translate to greater business benefits.
   
4. Lacking the right mindset
   Internal stakeholders must buy into what DevOps means and why the prerequisites of infrastructure and agility are important. Without the right cultural mindset, whereby teams collaborate rather than work in silos, DevOps adoption remains limited.
   
   The right cultural mindset, supported by a proven track record of quick wins, should be instilled deep within the organization to combat issues arising from employee churn, poor user confidence, and low tool adoption. It also complements the overarching change management strategy, which is crucial to DevOps success.

Let me explain with an example. One of our clients, a leading wealth management organization with nearly USD 60 billion in assets, had embarked on a DevOps program but was struggling to see value. On assessing their landscape, we discovered that the client’s infrastructure hosted nearly 100 applications. Moreover, the infrastructure was shared across development, operations, and testing teams. Environments could not be provisioned fast enough, resulting in significant time and effort spent by application owners and long release cycles.

To address this, we migrated a few chosen applications to the cloud, deployed our automation scripts, and used existing tools with CI / CD. We provided a flexible DevOps framework, which helped them reduce manual effort by 80%, simplify test case development, and improve workload management. This pilot execution was the first step towards demonstrating the value of stable cloud infrastructure, collaborative teams, and quick wins, which helped the client streamline their DevOps implementation journey.

Conclusion

DevOps success is not dependent on the outcome of a few tools but on the combination of multiple factors discussed above. Organizations must introspect which of these factors could be impeding their progress.

When implemented correctly, DevOps creates a synergy between the business and IT. It helps application owners to adapt on-demand and meet dynamic business needs – a crucial capability in an age where time to value can make or break organizations.