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Through DevOps best practices for effective communication and collaboration, many organizations are taking steps to enable employees to work remotely better.
Teams face another unique set of challenges when communicating and collaborating in this remote environment - how should they effectively coordinate efforts while telecommuting in such conditions? Stay with us as we explore the best communication and collaboration practices. Join us as we answer this question together.
DevOps Communication And Collaboration
What is DevOps communication and collaboration? As COVID-19 begins its global rollout, this globalized view will gradually gain members - eventually reaching more organizations and businesses than anyone could have foreseen a short while ago.
No matter the working style, our new way of working requires best practices in terms of communication and collaboration. Organizations should consider ways to ensure telecommuters experience equal collaboration and productivity as if working from an office environment.
Technological advancements like increased device capacity and faster internet connectivity have dramatically facilitated workforce communication and collaboration.
Consistent collaboration across technologies like voice calls, video streaming, or messaging services allows telecommuters to rapidly complete tasks by effectively conveying them quickly with effective communication methods.
Innovation provides the basis for better communications across geographical boundaries and allows telecommuters to work more efficiently; however, its significance cannot be fully appreciated without outlining specific best practices for communication and collaboration in DevOps.
DevOps Communication And Collaboration: Best Practices
Organizations and telecommuters implementing a remote work strategy should incorporate effective communications and collaboration practices for maximum efficiency within the DevOps pipeline.
Communication, timetables, telecommuter qualification requirements, and compensation plans play a part. Remittance must also be handled accordingly.
Establish Right Real-Time Communication & Collaboration Channels
A practical approach for encouraging continuous communication and collaboration is facilitating face-to-face meetings within an electronic collaboration space.
Email can be an engaging form of internal communication, but it cannot be an efficient collaborative tool. They need to break out of their email habit and increase the use of alternative means for DevOps communication, such as Slack channels.
Organizations may encourage meeting participants to use mobile video devices instead of video conferences requiring dedicated facilities; mobile video tools allow people to attend meetings regardless of location.
Mobile video conferencing is simple to set up and can provide critical experts. Since ongoing DevOps effective communication and collaboration advancements make it simple to follow collaborative behavior, performance rewards, and incentives can be given to cultivating teamwork and reward collaboration within the organization.
Share Information Synchronously And Asynchronously
Synchronous communication refers to an exchange of information that takes place daily between at least two individuals within an organization or workplace setting.
However, asynchronous communication refers to any exchange of information among people that does not necessitate all recipients being available and responsive immediately.
Studies reveal that 66% of workers state frequent workflow disruptions are detrimental to productivity, thus making this form of DevOps communication essential.
Asynchronous communication reduces costly interruptions by encouraging teams to share both data synchronously and asynchronously - this allows everyone to remain proactive rather than reactive.
Set A Clear Agenda For Virtual Meetings
As the meeting host, your primary responsibility should be to ensure a successful gathering. To do this, create an agenda that you can distribute before each meeting and introduce yourself at its start before outlining call members' jobs and the meeting objectives.
These simple practices give meeting participants a visual understanding of who's present, what will be discussed, and how best to organize their ideas or pose any queries.
After your call, outline what was discussed and the tasks assigned to the development and operations teams. Ensuring your teams understand their primary objectives while outlining job roles and holding them accountable will result in optimal performance from everyone involved.
Prioritize Documentation Within The Organization
Working remotely makes walking over to someone's office to answer a quick question impractical; not only are there various DevOps communication channels to navigate and extra interruptions that come along with this approach, but you must also respect any current calls or projects your colleagues might be working on.
Remote work necessitates purposeful and structured communication. Without it, things may get misunderstood or missed altogether - try reporting more often, establishing best practices for documentation purposes, creating documents to outline goals, adjusting next steps or answering queries, and trying not to misread reports as much as possible.
These documents will ensure everyone on your DevOps team is on the same page and serve as an excellent way to introduce anyone who is new or looking to catch up.
Read More: Why DevOps? Maximize Your Software Product Engineering Impact with Cost-Efficient Implementation!
Collaboration Techniques For DevOps Teams
Effective collaboration is critical for DevOps teams and one of the primary reasons DevOps exists. Here are some collaboration techniques for DevOps teams to improve cooperation.
Establishing Cross-Functional Teams:
Cross-functional teams are essential for effective collaboration, which means assembling people from across different departments - for instance, representatives from development, operations, and maintenance departments, among others - into an interdepartmental group to break down silos and facilitate cooperation among departments.
Cross-functional teams increase efficiency. Sharing information becomes simpler, problem-solving becomes more superficial, and working toward common goals more productively becomes possible.
Pair Programming
Pair programming is an approach where two programmers collaborate on the same project simultaneously, promote teamwork, increase efficiency, and reduce errors significantly while simultaneously providing developers the chance to learn from one another.
Automation And DevOps Tooling
Automating small processes and employing DevOps tooling are effective strategies for increasing team collaboration.
Automating tasks frees teams to focus on more pressing projects. At the same time, DevOps tools allow teams to work together more efficiently, thus improving overall collaboration.
Shared Metrics And KPIs
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics should be shared among teams to encourage collaboration. Sharing KPIs allows teams to identify weaknesses so that improvements may be implemented more quickly; furthermore, monitoring ensures all efforts are monitored and held accountable.
Culture In DevOps Teams
Successful DevOps lifecycle requires cultivating a culture that prioritizes DevOps collaboration and communication; in this section, we explore the importance of DevOps success and ways to facilitate it within organizations of various sizes.
Furthermore, this discussion includes some large organization's DevOps environment cultures as examples for comparison purposes.
Importance Of Culture
DevOps culture is an integral component of its implementation and success. When organizations adopt DevOps, they accept an entirely different way of working that requires communication and cooperation among entire teams collaborating across silos to provide agility, speed, quality, and scalability benefits for them.
Building a DevOps Culture That Values Collaboration and Communication
Establishing a DevOps culture that prioritizes collaboration and communication requires everyone to work towards this end together; here are some strategies for encouraging it.
Team members should be encouraged to explore new experiences, attempt something different, and accept failure without blame for errors made or mistakes committed; rather, mistakes should be seen as opportunities for learning rather than criticism being levied at individuals who made them. DevOps product teams' achievements should be celebrated: integrations of new features, new issues solved, etc, should all be recognized and marked accordingly.
Conclusion
DevOps team collaboration tools are more crucial than ever in today's fast-paced and unpredictable workplace, especially given significant distances, functional warehouses, and an ever-evolving business goal landscape that makes team building increasingly challenging.
Never has there been a better opportunity to use these best DevOps communication and collaboration to increase teamwork performance while strengthening communication channels.
Communication tools exist to aid communication, collaboration, project management, and information sharing. However, a software development process is also designed to assist synchronous and asynchronous communication, increasing team efficiency.
