Abstract/Summary

The research, undertaken in organisational environments within IT-oriented culture and highly structured processes, outlines challenges and benefits associated to the adoption of Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices and principles. Realizing the adoption of DevOps practices and principles is no longer restricted to technology-specific skills. Studies indicate that successful DevOps adoption is part of continuous organisational transformation at various levels, and that includes a shift in cultural and behavioural patterns, process-driven perspectives, and toolchain usage readiness. There are also DevOps models to suggest an adoption roadmap for organisations to follow through the transitional path from existing highly structured processes to agile and lean approaches. However, there is a considerable lack of validated adoption models which are inclusive of leadership styles, traits, characteristics and the connection to adoption success or failure. This thesis details the explanation of product development approaches and using a mixed methods approach aims to provide proof and evidence to support the answers towards three research questions. The approach collected data through thirty interviews with industry practitioners, who were from ten countries working in nine different industry sectors. Almost two-thirds of interviewees had practiced DevOps. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles, which organisations choose to include in their DevOps adoption journeys were identified. The most frequently adopted structured service management practices, contributing to DevOps practice adoption success, indicate that those with software development and operation roles in DevOps-oriented organisations benefit from existence of highly structured service management approaches such as ITIL® . Furthermore, coded themes were generated based on the thirty interviews to expand understanding of relevant factors and produce the structure of an online survey. The analysis and evaluation of the online survey (n=250) confirmed some of the initial findings of the interviews and expanded viewpoints on other perceived outcomes. Out of the total 250 participants, 81% had 10+ years of professional experience and two-thirds were practicing DevOps. 73% of participants were from Europe and 76% had held previous leadership positions. The aim of the survey was to unveil leadership-specific observations on characteristics and factors that would indicate certain reasoning behind challenges faced by organisations while transitioning to DevOps. The research questions which evolved around (R1) an understanding of how productivity can be improved for software product development teams, indicated that there is a specific set of service management, project management and product management practices and principles to take into account. Furthermore, evidence produced from the qualitative and quantitative studies confirmed (R2) that DevOps-oriented organisations have mainly preferred to extend the structured approaches previously adopted such as ITIL® v3. The online survey produced significant evidence (R3.a) of industry practitioners’ desire to have a leadership role for the purposes of DevOps practice and principle adoption. (R3.b) The emergent leadership style pertinent to the transition of IT-focused organisations to DevOps condensed to the linkage of transformational and servant leadership. The observations from the confirmatory study of the online survey (n=250) contributed to the design and development of a conceptual model which emphasizes. The conceptual model was validated using PLS-SEM to improve understanding of significance and predictive power of construct validity and corresponding manifest variables. The final, model evaluation research stage of three focus group interviews (n=19), indicated industry practitioner consensus on the validated model in a range of 70% - 79%. The thesis outcomes formulate a leadership model towards the fulfilment of DevOps adoption within organisations. The thesis outcomes also aim to support the transitional efforts to DevOps, and commitment of software-intensive i.e. enterprise with an IT organisation. In this way, it become possible to enhance the competence level of an organisation’s adoption capability, guide DevOps adoption leadership through its upskilling journey, and achieve the cultural shift of mindset to enable continuous and habitual change.