In the current scenario that most Telcos find themselves in, there is a strong need to roll out new products faster and in a very stable manner, while the declining revenue growth also demands a cut in IT spend. To make the situation trickier, organizations are structured in siloed team formations where we have a team for IT Development and one for operations. This invariably results in ownership conflicts while handling critical customer-impacting business processes. In such a case, there is a strong ask from most telecom operators to adopt more sustainable and optimized ways of working, with clear and contained ownership within one domain, to enable change while maintaining stability - DevOps appears to be the unanimous first choice.
The solution appears simple at first glance. However, since this is a huge disruption, going with a big bang where we introduce major changes in one shot could lead to failure as teams may take longer time to grasp and adopt all of these changes. Also, there are scenarios where the team’s maturity doesn’t complement the big changes. In order to prevent chaos and ensure DevOps doesn’t result in burden or failure, we suggest a phased approach to move toward embracing effective DevOps.
Initial Set Up
We have laid down these basic checks before we start ideating DevOps for an organization.
Assessing the maturity of the current landscape to see which stage we are on in terms of…
If implemented smartly, this will play a critical role in reducing a large amount of manual Operations work. Additionally, it will aid in the generation of insights for improvement in both the IT domain as well as the business.
On the basis of these parameters, we have listed a few criteria and also defined the maturity levels which we usually see in any organization. The maturity levels in yellow tiles are the basic levels an organization must be at, in order to move toward embracing DevOps.
Fig 1 - DevOps Maturity levels
Basic Toolsets
For easy adoption of DevOps Ways of Working, along with a People mindset, cultural change and process changes, an ideal combination of toolsets can deliver magic. Below is the list of suggestions considered ideal for adoption of DevOps.
Table 1 - Recommended stage and Potential toolsets to start with DevOps Implementation
Deepti Shriganesh Bhide
Senior Consultant, Communication BU, Wipro Limited.
Deepti Bhide is a Solution Lead representing the Cloud Transformation team, T-Mobile Netherlands, as part of the Communications BU. She has 13+ years of experience working with various service providers across Europe.
Mansi Dubey
Consultant, Communication BU, Wipro Limited.
Mansi Dubey is a DevOps consultant working for T-Mobile Netherlands, Transformation program as part of the Communications BU. She has 6+ years of experience working with various service providers across Europe.