5 Basic Values of The DevOps Mindset

The five basic values of the DevOps mindset described below will support our practice. These values are not new ideas, they have been reconstructed.

People and processes are more important than any technical "silver bullet" in solving business problems and require more time.
Many IT professionals today are struggling to adapt to change and disturbance. Let me put it this way, are you trying to adapt to change? Do you feel overwhelmed? This is not uncommon. Today, the current state of IT is not good enough, so we need to constantly try to re-evolve ourselves.
With more than 30 years of comprehensive IT experience, we have witnessed the importance of people and relationships for IT companies to improve efficiency and help businesses thrive. However, in most cases, our conversation about IT solutions starts with technology, not people and processes. The tendency to find "silver bullets" to solve business and IT challenges is too common. But you can’t think of innovation, DevOps, or effective teams and ways of working; they need to be nurtured, supported, and guided.
Because disturbances are so common and there is such an urgent need for the speed of change, we need discipline and fences. The five basic values of the DevOps mindset described below will support our practice. These values are not new ideas; as we have learned from experience, they have been reconstructed. Some values are interchangeable, they are flexible, and they, like pillars, lead to the overall principles that support these five values.

1. Feedback from stakeholders is essential
How do we know if we have created more value for us than stakeholders? We need durable quality data to analyze, inform and drive better decisions. Relevant information from reliable sources is essential for the boom of any business. We need to listen to and understand what our stakeholders say, not that we need to implement change in a way that allows us to adjust our thinking, processes, and technology, and adjust it as needed to benefit our interests The stakeholders are satisfied. Due to incorrect information (data), we often see too few changes, or many changes have occurred due to errors. Therefore, combining change with feedback from stakeholders is a basic value and helps us focus on what is most important to make the company successful.

Focus on our stakeholders and their feedback, not just change for change.

2. Improve beyond the limits of today's processes
We hope that our products and services will continue to satisfy our customers, who are our most important stakeholders. Therefore, we need continuous improvement. This is not just about quality; it can also mean cost, availability, relevance, and many other goals and factors. It is great to create repeatable processes or use common frameworks, they can improve governance and many other issues. However, this should not be our ultimate goal. When looking for ways to improve, we must adjust our processes and supplement them with the right technologies and tools. There may be reasons to throw a "so-called" framework, because not doing so may increase waste, and what's worse is just "goods results" (do something that has no value or purpose).

Strive to always innovate and improve repeatable processes and frameworks.

3. Don't use new islands to break old islands
Crysis and DevOps are not compatible. We can often see: IT executives bring so-called "experts" to implement agile and DevOps, what do they do? These "experts" create a new problem based on the existing problem, which is an additional island in the IT department and business. Creating "DevOps" positions violates the principles of agile and DevOps based on breaking islands. In agile and DevOps, teamwork is essential. If you are not working in a self-organizing team, then you will not do anything.

Inspire and share with each other instead of becoming a hero or creating an island.

4. Knowing your customers means cross-organizational collaboration
No part of the enterprise is an independent entity, because they all have stakeholders, and the main stakeholders are always customers. "Customers are always right" (or King, I like to say this). The point is that without customers, there is really no business, and in order to maintain business, we now need to be "differently treated" from our competitors. We also need to understand what our customers think of us and what they expect of us. Understanding customer needs is imperative, and timely feedback is required to ensure that the business can quickly and responsibly meet the needs and concerns of these major stakeholders.
Minimize time spent with build-measure-learn process
Whether it's ideas, concepts, assumptions, or direct stakeholder feedback, we need to identify and measure the features or services provided by our products through the use of exploration, construction, testing, and delivery life cycles. Fundamentally, this means that we need to "insert" our organization throughout the organization. There are no boundaries in continuous innovation, learning, and DevOps. Therefore, when we measure across the enterprise, we can understand the whole and take feasible and meaningful steps to improve.

Measure the performance of the entire organization, not just within the scope of the business.

5. Encourage adoption through enthusiasm
Not everyone has to be driven to learn, adapt and change; however, just as smiles can be contagious, so does learning and willingness to be part of a culture of change. Adaptation and evolution in a learning culture provides a group of people with a natural mechanism for learning and transmitting information (that is, cultural communication). Learning styles, attitudes, methods and processes are constantly evolving, so we can improve them. The next step is to apply what has been learned and improved and share information with colleagues. Learning does not happen automatically; it requires effort, assessment, discipline, awareness, especially communication; unfortunately, these are tools and automation can not provide. Review your processes, automation, tool strategy and implementation, make it transparent, and collaborate with your colleagues to reuse and improve.

Promote a learning culture through lean delivery, not just tools and automation.

To sum up
Continuous goals of DevOps mindset
As our company adopts DevOps, we continue to advocate these five values on various books, websites, or automated software. It takes time to adopt this way of thinking, which is completely different from what we used to do as a system administrator. This is a completely new way of working and it takes many years to mature.