DevOps is becoming a standard practice for enterprises of all types, giving teams the tools they need to collaborate and drive results. But for large organizations in particular, effectively implementing DevOps can come with challenges surrounding cultural changes, unifying toolchains, eliminating cumbersome silos, and more.

In  recent article, Atlassian explored some actions enterprises can take to scale their DevOps transformations and came up with a few tips. We have highlighted six of them to share with you here:

1.     Recognize That It’s Okay to Start Small

With DevOps, it can be easy to get caught up with lofty objectives. This focus (aiming for the moon without thinking about the steps you need to take to get there) can cause DevOps initiatives to falter, which is why it’s important to keep in mind that starting small can actually be more beneficial in the long run.

Atlassian recommends identifying low-hanging fruit like getting your teams using the same versions of one or two key tools like Git or Jira. Make these small-scale changes first, and then work from there to replicate them.

2.     Encourage (Don’t Force) Changes

For Atlassian, the focus is less on telling people what to do and more on showing them how re-thinking their processes and techniques can help them become more productive and successful.

Atlassian takes its cues from its Team Playbook, a no-nonsense guide to unleashing your team’s potential. The Team Playbook includes a Health Monitor, which allows you to evaluate how your teams are doing right now, as well as breakdowns of plays and game plans.

3.     Stay Up to Date with Progress

Knowing what’s going on is important in both keeping you up to speed and giving you a stream of examples you can talk about with your teams.

Remember, the successes you share don’t need to be monumental. Highlighting small-but-important process changes like modest reductions in customer-reported bugs or rolled-back releases can matter just as much as broadcasting the major milestones.

Have you ever wondered what goes into Atlassian’s secret DevOps sauce? Click here to find out!

4.     Be Consistent

It’s not uncommon for enterprises to have disparate instances split across and between teams. Consolidating them is one of the most important steps you will take in your DevOps journey. This will make it easier for individuals to share ideas, and it will simplify the ongoing management of your infrastructure, applications, and add-ons.

5.     Plan for Quick Growth

DevOps is a contagious process. Once it starts, it tends to ramp up rapidly. That is why you need to make sure your tools and systems are ready to scale to meet your dynamic and evolving needs.

6.     When in Doubt, Ask for Help

You don’t need to do DevOps alone. Especially for larger enterprises, implementing the cultural, technical, and process-oriented changes can be a challenge. Working with experienced DevOps experts to plan, execute, and manage your transition can save you time, reduce hassle, and ultimately make your DevOps journey more successful.

Accelerate Your DevOps Transition with Managed, Integrated, and Enterprise-Ready Toolchains

A managed DevOps toolchain is the smarter solution for automating software development and delivery:

• Unified, Collaborative CI/CD Tool Chain: We integrate configure, and manage your favourite tools-as-a-service into one flexible toolchain to simplify and streamline development processes.
• DevOps Consulting Service: Our DevOps experts are here to understand your DevOps and business objectives so we can help make recommendations and implement changes to get you to the end goal quicker. We can also accelerate your team’s onboarding by providing DevOps tool chain and processes best practices.
• Overcome Resource Complexity and Challenges: Spend more time on your core business and rely on experts for your DevOps initiatives. We offer a turnkey toolchain-as-a-service as well as DevOps-as-a-service to be an extension of your DevOps team.

We support a broad variety of leading development tools including CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, GitHub, JFrog, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Hipchat, Trello, and many more.

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Whether you want to start your DevOps journey or accelerate the one you’re already on, iTMethods is your partner. Contact us today to learn more about how an integrated and managed DevOps toolchain can help you transform great ideas into great software.

Read more from iTMethods:

• Why You Need to Care about DevOps
• Three Questions to Ask Before Signing a Cloud Managed Service Provider
• Aligning Developers with a DevOps Cloud Strategy