Dominica DeGrandis has spent most of her career synchronizing interactions and dependencies between teams, Dominica is keen on improving the way teams work together to help bring alignment to the entire organization. Dominica holds a BS in Information Computer Science from the University of Hawaii. She is an independent trainer, coach and international speaker. She can be reached at[email protected]and on twitter at@dominicadwhen not in the yoga studio or the garden.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Uniting Development and Operations
Excerpt from the Podcast
Joe: Let me dive into the teamwork a bit here. Is teamwork that much different in DevOps than it is in other parts of an organization?
Dominica: I believe so, yes. I believe that because there are different incentives for development teams versus operations teams. In the development world, you are getting paid, and you are getting recognition for creating, developing, and deploying new functionality into production. In the operation’s world, we are getting paid and recognized for keeping productions stable. Anytime change is put into production, there is a risk of destabilizing it. There’re two opposite ends there as far as incentives go. Usually these two things will report up to different directors. Sometimes you’ll have to go to a VP level to get a common leadership point.
Joe: Well, you’re a proponent of combining the two, aren’t you?
Dominica: I’m a proponent of the DevOps movement. The DevOps movement is about bridging that gap between the two teams. You could merge these teams but not necessarily. It’s really meant to help bring an understanding of these different teams so that they can break out of their individual functional silos and start improving the way they work together for the benefit of the organization as a whole. What’s the real goal here? Are we trying to deliver new functionality to get us a jump ahead in the market? We want to start having teams look at that goal instead of just only trying to keep production stable or only trying to get the highest number of change request fixed in a limited amount of time.
Joe: When we talk about that gap, to bridge it or bring it together. The obvious thing is better communication, but there’s got to be more to it than that.
Dominica: Completely. I think the biggest thing is probably bringing visibility. Bringing visibility to what the other teams are doing. Many times these teams have heavy dependencies on each other. The development team is dependent on operations supplying them with environments and equipment. Access to different databases and trying to bring some visibility to those dependencies upfront and early on is very useful. Normally, we don’t have a lot of visibility between these two teams because they’re off in their own silo. They’re off in their own world and one team will say, “Oh, why does it take so long to get an environment up?”
They don’t have a clue at the struggles that some of these operations teams have to go through just to get servers ordered in or just to get refreshed from production. So this ability helps bridge the gap between the teams and it brings them closer together so they can understand and help. We want them to help each other out.
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