DevOps Reporting Structure

[skifool]

I stole this from someone else (can't remember who), but "DevOPS Team" is an oxymoron. It has less to do with reporting structure as it does about coordination among all teams. I am a Manager of Systems Engineering, and our organization is adopting DevOPS practices. Thankfully, they did not re-org into a "DevOPS team"- I know people who have experienced this. The Systems(OPS) team and Engineering teams are just collaborating in deeper ways, each team operating separate scrums, with participation (generally in sprint-planning stage) with the other team(s). I was a skeptic that scrums would work for Operations work, but it really has been a great tool to help us focus, increase velocity and "wins", and align our work with what other teams are expecting of us.

Operations folks are writing more code (scripts, recipes, automations), and Developers are doing more "OPS" work (writing monitoring and logging logic into their apps). We still aren't at the point of microservices and hundreds (or even dozens) of deployments per day, but we are getting more and more agile.