Axelos, famous for its ITIL(r) and PRINCE(r) frameworks, issued a series of publications on DevOps culture and DevOps engineering.

In this publication our authors discuss the presented 4 challenges/barriers on the organization’s road to DevOps culture.

“1.      An organization’s structural barrier keeps DevOps teams from thriving: 

Organizational structure barriers are easy to spot but difficult to change.These organizational structural barriers include the following:

a) the excessive layers of anxious middle management which stand between ideas and their execution,

b) pathologically siloed organizational structures with no history of or incentives to engage in collaboration, and

c) senior-level executives who are not able, willing, or skilled to lead digital disruption in the company.

2.      Cultural habits an fears prevent individuals and teams from innovating: for 25% of global enterprise IT organizations, a change in culture is one of the top three challenges they are facing (Upskilling IT 2023). Culture refers to the organization’s informal patterns that signal to people which behaviors are right and which behaviors define you as difficult.

The challenges can be summarized as:

a) not bringing the right people into the organization or not keeping and developing them once there,

b) aversion to risk-taking and proposing innovative ideas, and existing habits of seeing past failures and successes inhibit change.

3·      Existing processes, bureaucracy, and procedural hurdles challenge even motivated staff members and teams: existing complex processes hamper the ability to make changes as there are too many dependencies and constituencies to connect. For 15% of IT enterprise organizations, the lack of innovative operating models hampers their progress. Existing processes and procedures are important as they are useful in getting things done, but they also cause issues if there is too much emphasis on internal processes and procedures versus the focus on outcomes.

4·      Technology trends will continue to drive challenges: although there are a variety of technology topics that are interesting, exciting and might provide a variety of benefits, technology challenges are unavoidable, but the continuous adoption of technology continues to increase the technical debt. For 31% of IT enterprise organizations, managing technical debt and/or avoiding technical debt is a significant challenge. “