Information Technology

Your new DevOps-enabled team is going to be busy. They’re learning how to use some new tools, they are learning to work together in more productive and efficient ways. You want them to know when things are going well.

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Part of choosing good goals, with metrics attached to them, is that you can put up some graphs and see how the team is improving toward those goals. You can prove to the team that deployment time has improved, and by how much. The product manager is hopefully ecstatic that the new features customers have been suggesting are now in sight for making it into production on a more efficient timeline.

In addition to the metrics related to your goals, you also need to check in with your team members, one-on-one. While we all hope that the team is excited to be working more closely and getting a better product out, you still have to check on everyone and see how they are doing as individual people.

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Finally, as a manager, you get to declare victory and throw a party. After working through a multifaceted project, it’s important to stop, recap, and celebrate. Choose a milestone that represents a significant amount of work, and plan to pause. When facilitating a large cultural and behavioural change, you want a little bit of time to assess the impacts of these changes, not just to the team directly involved, but also to any tangential teams. Hopefully other teams are getting interested in changing their behaviors, and they can come to you, your team, and your SMEs for help. Creating some documentation around lessons learned and the challenges you faced will help other teams heading in a DevOps direction.

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Then buy your team some cupcakes, or go to the movies, or do anything that says "We just did something difficult. We learned good new things, we unlearned bad old things, and we created a great product. Together."