Navigating the Complexities with Expert Guidance
When I embarked on my journey as a DevOps consultant, I discovered that the vast landscape of DevOps could be as complex as it is fascinating. Brimming with potential for transformative change, this field is more than just a set of practices; it’s a gateway to operational excellence. 🚀
Embarking on the DevOps Journey 🧭
In 2010, my odyssey began when I moved to the US and joined a boutique consulting firm. Fast forward to today, and I’m still unravelling the intricacies of DevOps, only now I’m sharing this knowledge directly with you.
DevOps isn’t solely about the tools we use; it’s about the culture, the processes, and how these elements harmonise to produce better software faster and more reliably. From conducting workshops to having deep-dive conversations, the aim is to foster an understanding that resonates at all levels of an organisation.
Tailored DevOps Consulting: Your Needs, Our Expertise 👨🏫🎯
Here’s a snapshot of what my DevOps consulting can look like:
Interactive Workshops: Immersive experiences to get teams hands-on with DevOps principles.
Leadership Alignment: Facilitating conversations with leadership teams to drive top-down transformation.
Azure DevOps Specialisation: Leveraging my experience as a Microsoft MVP to help those ingrained in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Broadening Horizons Beyond Microsoft 🌐✨
Yes, there’s often a ‘Microsoft tint’ to the work due to my background, but DevOps is agnostic. Jira, TeamCity, and Jenkins – these are tools I’ve danced with, and the principles applied remain consistent across the board.
State of Your DevOps: The Report Card 📊📝
Some organisations seek clarity on where they stand. That’s where I step in with an analysis akin to a ‘DevOps report card’, identifying strengths, opportunities for improvement, and the critical next steps to elevate your practices.
Provoking Positive Change 🔄🌟
Consulting isn’t about prescriptive advice; it’s about conversation and provocation. Whether it’s a Swiss manufacturing giant or a fledgling startup, the essence of my role is to engage, question, and challenge, steering you towards better outcomes.
Technical Support & Code Writing: Yes, I Still Do It! 👨💻🔧
I’ve not left my coding days behind. I continue to support and innovate with tools that facilitate data migration in Azure DevOps, ensuring that your data works for you, not against you.
The Essence of DevOps Consulting: Broad, Deep, and Personal 🌊🤝
In essence, my approach to DevOps consulting is as varied as the needs of my clients:
Technical Troubleshooting: From the nitty-gritty of CI/CD pipelines to deployment strategies.
Cultural Shifts: Navigating the people aspect, which is as crucial as the technical.
Continued Learning: Engaging in ongoing dialogues to refine and adapt practices.
Why Choose DevOps Consulting? 🤷♂️💡
Why invest in DevOps consulting? Because it’s about making lasting improvements, building robust processes, and fostering a culture where continuous delivery and improvement aren’t just buzzwords; they’re a reality.
If you’re looking to harness the full power of DevOps, remember it’s not just about installing a tool or ticking a box. It’s a journey of improvement, efficiency, and cultural change.
And that journey, as your DevOps consultant, is one I’m here to navigate with you.
So what, what, what is it, this DevOps consulting thing that we offered? I’ve been doing DevOps consulting for quite some time. I started back in 2010 when I moved to the US, providing as a DevOps consultant. I was employed as a DevOps consultant by a boutique consulting company in the US, in Seattle, and I did consulting for three years operating out of there. When I moved back to the UK, I started offering that service to myself, to other customers.
It really takes a bunch of different forms, right? Some of it is just helping people understand DevOps. So I do presentations, I do workshops, I do just conversations, right, around DevOps, what it is, what it means to organisations. Quite often that’s with leadership teams. It depends who turns up, right? But I also offer a lot of, or have done a lot of consulting in the Azure DevOps space, a lot, because of my background as a Microsoft MVP in DevOps, right, within your DevOps space and my history with the Azure DevOps team and Azure DevOps consulting.
So quite a lot of people that come to me definitely have a Microsoft tint in their way of working. It’s not exclusive, right? It’s not required, but that quite often happens. If you’re known as an expert in a particular tool, then people tend to gravitate towards you that way, which is a lot of fun, and I love talking about Azure DevOps and how it works.
Some of that consulting is tool-based, right? What is Azure DevOps? How does it work? How can it help an organisation? How can they use it better? How can they help people and their teams adopt it better? But the tools and techniques that I talk about can be applied to any tool, whether you’re using Jira or TeamCity. These are all tools that I’ve worked with and helped companies with as well.
Azure DevOps consulting kind of takes a number of forms because there’s a bit in potentially understanding what it is that you’re doing. Some organisations want a report, right? Where are we? Are we actually doing DevOps? Do we actually generally understand what it is? I’ve come in and done, they used to be called DPSes. Microsoft had a name for it because there was some funding for it for enterprises, deployment planning services.
Effectively, it’s a state of DevOps report. What is the current state of DevOps in your organisation? I would come in, spend a week with folks in your organisation, interviewing them, talking about how they’re building products, their ways of working, and then I would build up a report on what’s the current state of DevOps in your organisation and what are the things that you’re going to need to tackle? What are the opportunities for improvement? Places where things aren’t going so well.
What if you only did three things? What are the top three things? That’s quite a common one. I’ve done that a lot, both DevOps and Agile, right? That’s the same story; it works in both places. But ultimately, consulting is about coming in and actually provoking change inside of an organisation.
So the most common thing that I do is just coming in and talking to folks. I got one recently, kind of on a little bit of a retainer with a large manufacturing organisation in Switzerland. They’re all over the place, but the people I work with are in Switzerland. We talk. That’s really all it is from my perspective. We talk, I answer questions, we engage on different topics. We understand how talking about how they’re doing work, how they could maybe change the way they do work, how could they change the way they do the work better.
Then they go off and try things in their organisation. They change the way they do things, see if it works for them, and then come back for another session with more feedback, more ideas, more problems, and we discuss and figure them out. I have quite a few customers that are in that category.
That’s the DevOps consulting. I also provide some technical help and support. That’s maybe something of note. I actually still write code today. That’s Martin still writes code, yep. I build, support, and maintain a product that allows you to migrate data around in Azure DevOps, so taking a project and splitting it or merging projects, whatever it is that you want to be able to do.
I’ve been working around since 2016. Before then, 2015-2016 is when I started that product, and lots of people use it. Sometimes they have questions about how they should use it, what capabilities does it have, can they get any help and support with it, can they get training for it? So I do provide that as well, and I kind of include that in DevOps, right? Because it’s part of that, that they’re doing DevOps stuff and they want help with their DevOps stuff.
So really, it’s quite broad. DevOps is this very broad consulting area where I might just talk to people, or I might go all the way to helping them with their tooling and helping them figure out how to use it better.
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