DevOps is very popular nowadays. Everybody is seeking to implement DevOps in his company even without really understanding where it comes from and where it goes. DevOps impacts the whole company and in most companies radically changes the way of thinking and working. However most companies only see a list of good practices.
DevOps == DevOps Team
DevOps is primarly a movement that aims to remove silos and department (inline with the 9th point of Deming’s 14 points). Consequently creating a new team or department with this name isn’t going to solve problems linked to how dev and ops work together. However, in certain circonstances it can be the name given to a task force aiming to start creating some automations. However, in order to propagate DevOps I would rather prefer a pilot project where new ways of developping are being tested.
DevOps == Automation
It is common to meet people reducing DevOps to automation when automation is a consequence of DevOps and not a cause. DevOps takes its roots into Lean which aims to reduce waste in the company. IT has a lot of wastes and today IT is crucial to companies development and inovation process. One of the many wastes we can find in IT is all the manual things we repeatedly do. Automation is the response to this waste. There are several other wastes that DevOps tackle, like the coordination needed to release a new version of a product in a monolith.
DevOps == Put Dev and Ops working together
Getting the wall down between dev and ops will help them to communicate. However, it won’t bring you much more than that. The result will be deceiving and it will be hard to justify the change. In order to get the real benefits from DevOps you need to implement a Continuous Improvement culture (Kaizen). This where DevOps takes its roots and what lead several companies to automate everything, create micro-services architecture, monitor everything all the time, work to achieve anti-fragility and so on.
DevOps is first and foremost a culture shift that will take a long time to companies to make. Without this culture shift you will only gain partial advantages just copying a bunch of good practices.