Transforming DevOps Culture with the 3 Ways: Breaking Silos and Building Collaboration

In large organizations with siloed teams, transforming to a DevOps culture can feel like steering a massive ship, it’s complex, challenging, and requires a cultural shift at every level. The concept of DevOps was developed to remove silos between developers and operations by getting them to work together as one, thus increasing engineering efficiency and productivity. However many organizations today now have a different silo called “devops” which would consist of experts who know their way around devops technologies. But that’s not what devops is. It is a culture that you have to implement within every team of your organization. In this article I will explore on how that is done.

The DevOps 3 Ways — Flow, Feedback, and Continuous Learning — provide a structured approach to achieving this transformation. These principles aren’t just about tools or processes; they’re about fostering a mindset of collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

The First Way: Flow

Flow is about creating a seamless pipeline from idea to delivery. It’s not just a process change but a fundamental restructuring of how teams work together.

Breaking Down Silos with Cross-Functional Teams

Instead of having separate DevOps, QA, and development teams, inject representatives from each discipline into every product or feature team. Each team should include:

• A DevOps engineer to handle automation, infrastructure, and deployments.
• A QA specialist to prioritize testing and quality from the beginning.
• Developers who build the product with input from all stakeholders.

These cross-functional teams ensure that conversations about infrastructure, testing, and delivery happen at the planning stage, not as afterthoughts. This approach reduces handoffs, accelerates delivery, and creates a sense of shared ownership.

Key Practices

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Automate infrastructure setup to make it repeatable and transparent. Tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation can help.
• Feature Architectures at Planning: Discuss architecture, testing strategies, and deployment pipelines during planning sessions. Ensure all stakeholders have a voice.
• Automation and CI/CD Pipelines: Implement continuous integration and delivery pipelines to streamline work, reduce manual errors, and accelerate feedback.

The Second Way: Feedback

Feedback is about creating tight loops of communication across teams and systems to catch issues early and improve continuously.

Fostering Collaboration with Feedback Loops

Having the right people in the room — dev, QA, and DevOps — during feature design ensures everyone knows what to expect. Beyond that, set up systems to provide immediate feedback:

• Use automated testing to catch regressions during development.
• Monitor systems in real-time and share insights with the team.
• Implement end-to-end tracing and logging to identify and resolve issues quickly.

Key Practices

• Blameless Postmortems: After every incident, conduct a postmortem focused on identifying root causes and documenting lessons learned. Share these insights across teams.
• Feature Flags and Progressive Delivery: Experiment with new features in controlled environments, collecting real-time feedback without risking the broader system.
• Open Communication Channels: Use tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams to ensure developers, testers, and ops can communicate quickly and transparently.

The Third Way: Continuous Learning and Experimentation

The Third Way is about embedding a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement into your teams.

Encouraging Experimentation and Innovation

Empower teams to try new technologies and approaches without fear of failure. For instance, if there’s a new tool that might improve deployment speed or monitoring, let teams experiment with it in a sandbox environment.

Learning from Mistakes

Create an environment where mistakes are opportunities to learn rather than punishable offenses. Document them in playbooks and ensure the knowledge is accessible across the organization. Regular retrospectives allow teams to reflect on what’s working and what’s not.

Key Practices

• Dedicated Time for Learning: Allocate time for team members to experiment with new tools or take courses on DevOps practices.
• Retrospectives for Improvement: Regularly review what went well and what could be better after every sprint or project.
• Centralized Knowledge Repositories: Maintain up-to-date playbooks, runbooks, and best practices so teams can learn from each other’s experiences.

Building a Bottom-Up Culture

Cultural transformation in a large organization doesn’t happen through top-down mandates. Instead, it starts with empowering individual teams to embody the DevOps mindset and gradually spreads through:

1. Grassroots Adoption: Start with pilot teams to demonstrate the value of DevOps practices.
2. Evangelizing Success Stories: Share wins and lessons learned across the organization to inspire others.
3. Leadership Support: Leaders must model the behaviors they want to see collaboration, transparency, and continuous learning.

The Payoff: A DevOps-Driven Organization

When DevOps is ingrained into every team and process, your organization becomes more resilient, adaptable, and innovative. You’ll see:

• Faster delivery of high-quality software.
• Reduced friction between teams.
• A culture where experimentation and learning are celebrated.

Transforming a siloed organization is challenging, but by following the DevOps 3 Ways, you can create a culture that isn’t afraid to innovate, embraces collaboration, and constantly strives for improvement. It’s not just about getting things done, it’s all about doing them better, together through learning.