If you’re managing a DevOps team with remote workers, building and maintaining a healthy culture brings quite a few challenges. However, remote teams can also master flexibility and collaboration if they use the right strategies.
A growing number of businesses work with developers when they want their idea to be turned into reality. And since remote work has become the norm, you don’t really have a choice except to do your best to create a culture where remote DevOps work truly contributes to business growth.
Get the right tools
Numerous DevOps teams are made up of part-time and full-time remote employees. This includes software developers, data engineers, product managers, and so on. You should bear in mind that remote work really requires special strategies as well as careful execution in comparison to co-located teams.
Luckily, you can use numerous software tools for supporting your remote workers in their daily and project management tasks.
One of the best options available is of course Jira. And if you want to upgrade it, there’s a Gitlab plugin to integrate these two tools. This allows safe and easy connection of Gitlab reports to Jira, automatic syncing of your Gitlab reports in real-time, as well as some more advanced features.
Recruit and retain
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Before recruiting new candidates for a DevOps team, you need to know one thing about building a team. It’s not only about recruiting but also about retaining.
On average, it’s much more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Salespeople know this very well. But the same holds true when it comes to building effective and productive teams. It’s much more affordable to keep and train people who already work in your team compared to recruiting new talent.
By identifying the right talent within your company that will fit in a team you’re building, you will not only save money but also the time that you would have to invest in teaching new employees about the workflow in your organization.
The best solution for DevOps team building, however, is to combine your existing team with freelancers. This provides knowledge about how to effectively organize processes and decision-making in an organization and upgrades it with new people that want to try new things and break down barriers.
But introducing freelancers to your salaried team can be challenging. So, to make the process go more smoothly, use a platform that can help you simplify the onboarding as well as organize your freelancers. A freelancer management platform helps you to track their services, location, availability, as well as project progress. In addition, you can pay and manage your contractors from one central, intuitive platform.
Communication is key
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If you run a team of DevOps who work to solve issues for people across the globe, offering 24/7 support to users is a must. One of the ways to provide this kind of support is to over-communicate. For some teams, this has proven to be very useful.
Running a team of people who have not met in person is not an easy feat. However, communication and sometimes over-communication can help you solve any misunderstandings that may arise if you fail to communicate properly. That allows for an agile team and excellent customer support at all times.
Make sure to reassess your organizational structure
Collaboration allows software companies to quickly execute and deploy changes. That’s why experienced companies strive to reduce the obstacles to collaboration.
In traditional IT companies, departments are generally siloed, interacting with each other only when it’s absolutely necessary. As a result, their knowledge of each other’s work is often limited.
If you want to reduce these silos, your first step is to analyze your organizational structure to be able to identify obstacles that stand in the way of better collaboration. One thing that can help you with this is to address structural obstacles between departments. In addition, you should implement a communication system between them.
Luckily, you can use some helpful tools to enable constant collaboration. Communication channels don’t need to be limited to conference calls or sending emails. And they shouldn’t be. Always bear in mind that DevOps professionals need quick and continuous collaboration for quick deployment.
A great way to enable collaboration in a company is to use unified communications. This system integrates email, conferencing, chat, phone calls, document sharing, as well as other platforms to exchange information within the organization. Moreover, with unified communications, you can access much of this information in a single place.
Final thoughts
If you want your team to go above and beyond, you need to give adequate compensation to your recruits, your teams need to be well-structured, and your goals should be based on your business priorities. Recruiting is important, but training your existing staff and retaining them may be even more important. When you mix all of these ingredients, you’ll have a team that truly thrives.
Continuous review and improvement are necessary for your DevOps to thrive. Try to understand what works and what you can improve. With continuous automation and collaboration, this is all possible. Regardless of how demanding your software development projects are, these simple strategies will help you take your DevOps team to a whole new level.
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