October 20169 technological updates revolutionize the market seemingly on a month-by-month basis. Businesses must be able to react immediately to these changes or become out-dated. Although this comes at a cost - within a nimble company, failure will happen, now the focus must shift to quick recovery or as some companies put it, `fail fast'. Having a DevOps team is risky - there is potential for the team to overlook certain errors during their speedy deployment of software. However, this is balanced by the team's ability to respond quickly to these oversights with fixes delivered at a speed not previously possible for traditional tech businesses. PeopleIn order to fully integrate a healthy risk appetite, companies must address how they motivate their personnel. Humans behave in accordance with how they are incentivized, so employee KPIs must be aligned with these behavioral changes. Both the development and the operations teams must share goals that are not measured by a mistake-free deployment of software.However, merely adjusting the KPIs of the teams is not enough to create a streamlined process and ad-equate cross-departmental communi-cation. Companies need to strength-en relationships to create empathy between developers and operations. This can be achieved by adding em-ployees with broader skills sets to ei-ther team, enhancing understanding between teams. Another tactic can be to rotate the staff through differ-ent roles to facilitate a more involved knowledge of the complete end-to-end deployment process.ProcessTraditionally, the development team is in charge of coding the software before the operations team releases it for public consumption. When adopting a DevOps mindset, each team has complete ownership of the process from creation to maintenance, while still remaining focused on one area of deployment. This shared responsibility facilitates the autonomy required for higher frequency deployment. Integrating a DevOps `toolchain' is essential for this process, granting both teams access to any stage of the software deployment chain. Tooling enables developers to perform operational tasks independently of the Operations team. This end-to-end involvement increases understanding and autonomy across both teams, leading to more frequent, higher-quality deployments. Technology companies are exposed to innovation on a daily basis. Being agile within the market is no longer setting businesses apart; it has become a necessity to survive. While not the answer to all process issues, DevOps is a step in the right direction. Adherence to this movement will lay positive foundations for a healthy risk appetite and improved cross- departmental cooperation with the company. This allows the company to focus less on its ground-floor processes and more on future technological innovations, ultimately keeping the business ahead of the curve. Many try to adopt the tenets of the burgeoning `DevOps' movement, but it is a complete system and culture overhaul that is far more involved than simply combining the two words `development' and `operations'
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