It’s easy for a disconnect to occur when multiple teams are working towards their own goals. That’s where a DevOps specialist comes in. They bring departments together, boosting collaboration, productivity and customer satisfaction.
DevOps (a mash-up of “development” and “operations”) is the practice of ensuring an organisation’s culture, tools and practices are aligned. One overall aim of a DevOps specialist (or DevOps engineer) is to instil pace of development to maintain a competitive edge and keep customers happy.
They’ll focus on introducing a better tech stack, to equip businesses with the means to deliver their products and/or services faster. Automation, collaboration, agility and security all come into play in this role.
At the same time, the previously siloed development and operations teams are viewed as a single entity. The DevOps engineer oversees the entire product development cycle, playing a part in the coding, application maintenance and application management.
WEBOPEDIA DESCRIBES DEV-OPS AS:
“an enterprise software development phrase used to mean a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units.”
The key responsibilities of a DevOps specialist
- Identify ways to improve an organisation’s processes and increase the value to the end user.
- Make recommendations in terms of optimal programming languages and systems.
- Build in security measures throughout the product life cycle.
- Establish automation to maximise productivity and agility.
- Understand customer needs and KPIs and develop processes to meet them.
- Plan team structure and facilitate collaboration between departments.
- Review and validate software code.
- Take ownership of incident management and root cause analysis.
Essential skills, knowledge & experience
- Database management
- Leadership and collaboration
- An understanding of application development
- Decision making
- Wide technical skills
- Coding knowledge
- Excellent troubleshooting
Making tech transformations an ingrained part of business culture
In a technologically-driven landscape, businesses want to adopt new technologies, but run the risk of losing alignment between teams. In most cases, this alignment is business-critical.
Successful DevOps takes into account cultural changes within an organisation. What’s important here is to maintain that connection between developers and operational teams. That’s why it makes sense to embed a DevOps specialist into your business that knows exactly how you work and can make decisions that add value to the customer.