In my last post I wrote about the “T-shape” model of a “great DevOps engineer” – but does that person actually exist?

I understand the DevOps team that builds & operates “something” in a complex environment. This includes the required software development aspects of it, the CI/CD pipeline, the monitoring tools required, the database or persistence layer, the infrastructure, … – everything that you need to be able to successfully operate what you have built as a team.

Wait… is it only that?

Everything mentioned above is technical, isn’t it?
The “software development” might be Java, Typescript or Go code (or anything else), the CI/CD pipeline is a technical thing. – but is this “enough” for the DevOps team?
I think that we need to add a business view into the team aswell – at the end, anything the DevOps Team builds needs to produce business value or needs to be compared to it.
A “defect” needs to get a dollar value, a new feature needs to produce new revenue and an update to our tools (e.g. monitoring) needs to be translated to costs or time&effort saved.

So what is the perfect DevOps engineer?

Skills shape

A “T-Shaped” DevOps engineer would need to change his skills to have a “Square-Shaped” Skills matrix!

What else does he need?

In additon to the “technical skills”, he will also need to have the business view on the microservice or component he and his team owns.
In an outage, he also needs the communication skills to be able to talk and communicate to clients and a sense of the urgency of the problem.

While I believe that there are a lot of great DevOps engineers around, I have not yet met one that was close to the “target” of being “perfect” in all of the points mentioned – and I am sure I forgot a few…. Feel free to comment!

A perfect DevOps engineer does not exist. It’s the perfect combination of different T-Shaped engineers that act as one team that makes a great DevOps team.
-Johannes, March 2022

What are key enablers for a great DevOps team?

Everyone in the team has its skills he is really good at. The really good DevOps engineers are able to “bend” their T-Shaped skills to something that is closer than to the square – maybe not in “all” parts of it but in a few of them.

But what a “great” DevOps team needs, more than anything else is Vision, Trust & Collaboration.

Recent experience from my professional career

In my professional career I recently joined a newly formed Development Team as part of a project. We quickly got up to speed with each other and created an atmosphere of trust in all of our (remote-only) meetings.
This made it easy to start collaborating and jointly work on the tasks we had in our backlog.
What we did not have right from the start was a vision, on what we wanted to achieve as a team. Once we had one, or at least a sprint goal for the next two sprints, we where able to quickly deliver value.

A team needs visionary engineers

If you want to create a great DevOps team, you will also need visionary engineers, that are brave enough to try out new things by themselves and empower the rest of the team to follow them towards their ideas.

What do you think about how to form a great DevOps team?
Please share your throughts in the comment section!