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Secrets Of High-Performing Teams: Part II

This is our second newsletter in the series of Secrets of Top-Performing DevOps Teams. In the first part, we’ve got to grips with the DevOps approach and the way it has amplified the IT workflow.

Here’s a quick reminder and a short introduction for the unaware:

Tech role has germinated from "help fix my laptop" to "help me become the best." While many dev teams are trapped firefighting, leading teams align with the business, adopt agile principles and automation, and lead the digital transformation.

What’s in it for DevOps, you’d ask? It’s simple: a robust DevOps team facilitates faster development of new products and easier maintenance of existing deployments.

Read between the lines - agile-based DevOps approach yields an increase in development productivity. And with no silver bullet methods for improving IT efficiency, perfecting DevOps might be your best shot.

Without further ado, let’s dive into our top picks for DevOps team success.

Hacking Your Way Through to a High-performing DevOps Team

1. High-performing teams put business first

You’d say, a revenue-first mindset won’t get you the probity medal. However, it’s not our point. In fact, profitability should be your top of mind not for the sake of money only.

Successful DevOps teams are more likely to tie their tech projects to revenue, mainly because it’s the 1️⃣ metric for their performance. As a result, teams that are business aligned tend to prioritize projects with business management and use business and tech scorecards to measure success. Therefore, just a simple shift from an activity-driven mindset to a revenue-first approach can guarantee a positive change in your team productivity and overall result.

(We’re not implying that you should ditch the customer-centric action, don’t compare apples and oranges)

2. They assign end-to-end responsibility

Separating development and operations can present potential issues and pitfalls like performance problems and inconsistent environments. In DevOps, both groups cooperate as a team that's completely responsible for a product from beginning to end.

Unlike the traditional approach or a low-performing team, where each team member is accountable for their own role, the perfect DevOps team obliterates those silos and makes an excellent result the focus of the entire crew.

A developer is no longer just a developer in charge of X lines of code. A tester is no longer accountable for the expected functionality. A high-performing team wears multiple hats and has got it ALL covered.

3. Automation technology is not an option for a dazzling performance

Let’s be honest: the bright minds like working with new and shiny technology. And you need those bright minds in your team to make it high-performing and guarantee superb results. It's a bit hard to employ and keep these big stars in a company that trusts in a creaky, legacy toolchain to build a product, right?

Investing in the DevOps tools will not only make the team more effective, but it will also make them want to stay. From a practical standpoint, automation tools can increase tech efficiency, eliminate errors, and help deploy apps faster. That refers to simplifying the process of configuring, monitoring, and maintaining the network infrastructure.

Pull it all together

There's no panacea for successful DevOps team building, but the process itself is definitely easier than quantum physics. The majority of our tips and tricks dispensed above are of common-sense variety. In practice, our secrets call for good old-fashioned hard work and a sprinkle of knowledge.

To deliver top-notch results, employees must be well-settled, teams well-structured, and objectives outlined based on business priorities. And it’s not enough to recruit the right people, retention and training are equally important. Overall, it takes a solid mix of all these components to build a team that truly thrives.

Join us to welcome today newsletter’s sponsor - BridgeCrew. BridgeCrew helps find, fix, and prevent cloud misconfigurations straight from your CI/CD pipeline. Their platform leverages automation and delivers security-as-code to streamline your DevSecOps processes.

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