Building a DevOps team: 7 tips to help you find your place

If your applications fail to be productive, so does your company. There is no pressure, but your applications are the face of your business and customers expect to get better apps faster with conventional methods.

Dev and ops teams often seem like they are speaking different languages bogging down the process of delivering fantastic apps to the customers. 

Key traits to look for when recruiting a DevOps team

Working on a DevOps team is not something most team members choose; the engineers who choose to work for longer periods become frustrated by the constant feedback exchanges. It takes a specific category of people to excel at being part of a DevOps team.  The following attributes will help you find your place on the team. 

1. Self-paced learning

The field of DevOps is constantly evolving, and it becomes more and more difficult to adapt your skills and keep the motivation alive. It becomes difficult to learn something that is evolving quickly. Self-paced learners are the best individuals for pursuing and embracing DevOps adoption. This requires a process of rolling-up-your-sleeves, do-it-yourself and trial-and-error, continuous learning approach.

2. Collaboration

DevOps, by nature, sees all the various technical staff in the enterprise as part of a unified whole. Experts say that DevOps represents the collaboration between operations and development, and thus “it’s crucial that all individuals in a team have the ability to adopt  a team-focused mindset.”

3. Communication

Ben Porterfield, the co-founder of Looker says, “Gone are the days of grumpy cave-dwelling Ops persona”.

Members of a DevOps team should be able to work with the entire engineering department, often with a host of departments. The DevOps team should make sure there are no misunderstandings or conflicts. 

SEE ALSO: DevOps is flourishing: New survey reports median salary of $90,000

4. Resilience

Constant improvement is another core attribute of DevOps. Working on a DevOps team requires trial-and-error, and a lot of effort to make sure that everyone is on the same wavelength. In short, if you’re on a DevOps team, you should have a very specific skill set, as well as critical thinking, something that’s not ingrained in the everyday tasks of business professionals.

5. Big-picture mindset

We’ve already mentioned that in order to succeed in a DevOps team, you need to be familiar with many skills and knowledge sets instead of focusing on just one element. 

6. Prioritize your time and attention

Your attention needs to be divided when you are on a DevOps team, which means you can easily get distracted. To make sure that doesn’t happen, it is crucial to finish tasks with a higher priority first. Experts say that the ability to prioritize is very important in DevOps. 

7. Empathy

Last but not least, working closely with other people seems to be inevitable, errors will occur, work will be delayed and things will not work as you initially planned. As long as you understand that a lot of things can go wrong and you embrace failure as part of the journey, you will help your team steer clear from finger-pointing. 

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