“10 ways to build highly effective DevOps teams” on Tech Beacon, April 17, 2018.
3. Integrate two-pizza teams around portfolios
Amazon has made waves in the DevOps world by introducing the concept of two-pizza teams: The most effective team is small enough that everyone on it can be fed with two pizzas. Using smaller team structures lends itself to successfully adhering to the loosely coupled, microservices style of software delivery that high-performing DevOps organizations favor.
But reorganizing IT into smaller teams can be daunting in the enterprise environment, said Alan Zucker, founding principal at DevOps consulting firm Project Management Essentials. Scaling up and “integrating these resources is much easier said than done,” he said.
One way to start is to build out portfolio-based organizations, he suggested.
“The portfolio-based team would include developers, production support or operations, testers, DevOps engineers, agilists, traditional project managers,” and others, he explained. “The teams may be functionally or role-aligned but share a leadership that is close to the work and focused on building and maturing the organization’s ability to quickly deliver value to their customers.”
On a practical level, Zucker said, this means that a group might have a vice president or director of technology who supports an application portfolio such as finance. From there, this vice president oversees a number of smaller business-aligned DevOps teams that would be led by managers or directors.
Some of these smaller teams might support product delivery in an application area such as revenue reporting, accounts payable, or financial reporting. Others might be functionally aligned around areas such as production support, testing, automation, and agile project management.
“By organizing the functional teams independently, these groups have the advantage of building and maintaining their craft while closely supporting the development delivery teams. And by closely aligning them within the delivery organization, they are able to have a shared sense of mission to serve a particular business area.”
—Alan Zucker
The leader of the overarching portfolio group would be in charge of orchestrating the teams so they share an organizational focus.
It is not easy to build this type of organization, he said “It takes leadership. It requires that the directors and managers see their role as building a collaborative and trusting environment for their team members.”