Get executive backing for DevOpsHow to convince management to get onboard with DevOps.

Any big change requires buy-in from management, and DevOps is no different. You need to give your manager (and others) reasons for supporting DevOps that they can understand.

Management support

Make sure management knows DevOps is a business change, not just a technology change. It’s a new way of working, not just a new set of tools. Set expectations: Sure, DevOps will help you deploy better software, more reliably, but it will also make the company more creative, productive and efficient.

Management support

Management can be turned off by buzzwords if they're not back up by substance. Talk about solutions to problems and practical benefits of DevOps.

Don’t say DevOps

Management can understand business benefits like these:

Better monitoring. Find problems before customers do, and improve recovery times.

Smaller, more frequent deployments. Reduce risk and get faster feedback from your customers.

Infrastructure as code. Roll out changes faster, with less manual work, and reduce handoff overheads.

DevOps benefits

Sometimes management fears that collaboration means no one can be held accountable. Help them understand that practices like sharing metrics, pairing, blameless postmortems and self-service for developers help IT operations become more efficient. And….

Collaboration

Let upper management know you're the one who's accountable for the results of this shift to DevOps. Yes, this can be scary, and comes with a degree of risk. But taking responsibility makes space for your team to embrace and get comfortable with DevOps practices — and with risk comes the reward of demonstrable success.

Responsibility

Remember, you don’t need to change everything at once. Talk with managers and team members early and often. Keep everyone informed during the change. It’ll go a long way toward helping smooth the transition to a fully functional DevOps organization.

One step at a time

For practical tips on getting DevOps buy-in from your operations team, the development team and executives, check out the DevOps Guide for IT Managers.

More in the DevOps for IT managers series:DevOps Principles for IT Managers Why Your Team Needs DevOps Bringing Dev and Ops Together