Culture

When you bring two groups of people together, the first thing you need to align is the culture. That's in my opinion also the reason, why a lot of the DevOps transformations fail. The company just didn't manage to align and establish a common culture, within which DevOps can thrive.

I have seen many examples of how DevOps failed. Here is a list of some of them:

Setting up a DevOps Team that purely is made up from developers, without anyone from the IT operations teams.

Special DevOps Teams completely separated from the development and IT operations teams. Which lead to things like "Oh, that's something the DevOps Team has to do. That's not my problem."

All the examples lead to still separated teams. But now, instead of having just two teams: Dev and Ops, a lot of these companies end up with three: Dev, DevOps and Ops teams, or more teams. Here the problem is not so much the number of teams, but the separation between the teams.

So the first thing to look at when you get started with DevOps, is to establish a culture that overcomes this separation. From experience, I can tell that this is a crucial and also most likely the hardest part. Especially as technical people have strong opinions about how things should be done. And also because humans in general need time to adapt to new behavior.