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Why HR has a key role supporting DevOps skills
If HR isn’t hiring team members fluent in proper skills and familiar with the duties across the delivery chain, then successful DevOps will remain just an ideal.
HR has a major role to play in DevOps. It’s true, even if HR is in many ways the opposite of IT.
Consider looking at DevOps as a means to an end, with the end being continuous delivery of software. From there, it becomes more apparent that there are other parties besides development and operations that determine how a business develops and handles the effects of its DevOps implementation. As we’ve talked about before, DevOps skills encompass more than just technical and coding know-how. DevOps is about connecting people within your enterprise, and therefore HR and other relation-driven departments have a role in establishing a DevOps culture.
HR wields an immense amount of power, handling changes in personnel. And who's ultimately responsible for the success (or failure) of the continuous delivery chain? That's right, personnel. If HR hasn’t fully embraced DevOps and can’t support those teams on the continuous delivery chain, that could undermine your enterprise's DevOps efforts in a big way. If your company’s HR team isn’t hiring full-stack engineers, or team members fluent in skills and duties across the delivery chain, and facilitating skills training for existing staff, then successful DevOps will remain an ideal and not a concrete reality for your company.
Other teams may not necessarily affect your DevOps capabilities as directly, but they could still have a part to play in, or be affected by, the grand scheme of their company's DevOps agenda. PR must make appropriate plans to promote new features coming in each new iteration. And frequent code changes could keep the legal team busy addressing licensing or compliance concerns.
We may sound like a broken record, but integration and transparency are key to DevOps, and those can't be achieved unless everyone within the company (and that means everyone!) is on the same page. Sure, certain teams or departments have bigger roles to play than others; again, development and operations are the teams that DevOps primarily concerns. But they need the proper support structure if they want to have any hope of maximizing the benefits DevOps provides.
