TUI

DevOps transformations in an enterprise are never easy. You can read about this in many different books, blogs or watch several different case studies. As we started our DevOps transformation last year, we could not have imagined the situation we are now in. A global pandemic created challenging times for the travel industry and sped up many digital transformations across the globe. Working from home and distributed teams became the new normal.

Due to these changes, we had to rethink our approach on how we help our different teams during their DevOps journey so that our organization could deliver faster in these uncertain times. In the past, we were able to solve certain challenges just with manpower, but this is not the case anymore.

One of the challenges we are facing currently is how to provide our teams with a quick and uncomplicated way to adopt the basic concepts of DevOps in a short timeframe to keep their motivation and engagement high.

This starts with lean & and agile knowledge to understand the flow of work and where blockers are existing. Additionally, our teams have to adopt new ways of working from a technical point of view and working with the cloud.

During the work with the first teams, we often faced similar questions and issues. At that time, we realized that platform teams could resolve some of these challenges more efficiently. On the downside we would break our principle of “you build it, you run it, you fix it!” for teams in the DevOps world right from the start. Also, centralized teams did not have the best reputation and were recognized as slow and inflexible in the past.

We started to approach this like the climb to the top of the Mount Everest. If you are new to mountain climbing, you will use certain accessories which are well proven from other people. In addition, you start to train with experienced trainers to use these tools on smaller mountains to get you ready for the higher ones.

We put together experienced people from the early DevOps teams with our cloud experts and a developer to form our first platform team. This team existed virtually at the beginning and was driven from the passion for generating value for other teams

Similar to this, we put together experienced people from the early DevOps teams with our cloud experts and a developer to form our first platform team. This team existed virtually at the beginning and was driven from the passion for generating value for other teams. They started to operate our source code and CI/CD platform for teams which were new to the DevOps journey. We initially planned to grow slowly and have time to build proper operational procedures, but we grew much faster than expected, and other teams have quickly started to use the platform and the templates. This gave us some positive challenges which motivated the platform team to further deliver value to others.

One of the main benefits for teams is that they often do not need to solve a problem themselves which was already solved by others in a stable and reliable way. This is especially important when you must learn many new things at the same time.

Another key factor for success was the constant engagement with the users of the platform and listening to their needs and challenges. These ideas and feedback influenced the priority and roadmap for the team.

What have we learned during the last year of setting up certain platform teams:

• Choose your platform teams wisely to provide the best value for your company

• Establish metrics for success (adoption rate, self-service capability, developer experience)

• Run them as a real product team

• Do not hesitate to close them down when they provide no value – have metrics in place for this decision

Platforms teams can play a major part in the adoption of DevOps in your organization if they are placed correctly, and they are focused on the developer experience. You can use them to support and guide your new “climbers” and prepare them at the base stations. All of this should help you to deliver faster value to your customers.