Getting your team on board with cloud native
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
Of course, you don’t want to alienate or upset your people. They’re here to work and they deserve to enjoy what they do. That’s why it’s important to spotlight the positives. What will your cloud-native strategy do to make IT’s life easier and how will it make them feel more valued and integral to the business?
Cloud-native migration can be a bumpy ride, but as the cloud leaders in our Cloud Native Comes of Age survey report show, there’s always a way to smooth the journey.
Acknowledging resistance
Making the move to cloud-native app development ultimately means a complete shake-up of your existing processes. In the survey, respondents felt that the most significant challenges in their own migration were skills (70%) and culture (65%). This is both due to legacy processes and a heavily ingrained culture in development teams.
Developers traditionally worked in siloes: they did the work, threw it “over the wall” to Operations, and once it was done, it was done. They liked the comfort of controlled releases and managed development. But with cloud native, this becomes a thing of the past and for developers ingrained in these age-old organizational practices that can be very uncomfortable.
The joy of education
As Vikrant discussed in his 3Es blog, education is a critical part of making the move to cloud native successful. Your people are far more likely to get behind a cloud strategy if they know why they need to change and what will happen to the business if they don’t.
For example, you can help your team achieve a small number of quick wins in a low-risk environment by moving non-vital products or services to the cloud first. This eases the team into the cloud environment, allowing them to learn new methodologies, operational practices, and tools without upsetting critical processes.
Getting excited about cloud native
Where applications were once “finished,” in cloud native they now live in a constant state of development, always open for iterative improvement.
Pulling your developers out of their comfort zone is a critical challenge. Enabling agile practices is all well and good, but what encouragement do your developers get out of it on a personal level?
Developers traditionally worked in siloes: they did the work, threw it “over the wall” to Operations, and once it was done, it was done. They liked the comfort of controlled releases and managed development. But with cloud native, this becomes a thing of the past and for developers ingrained in these age-old organizational practices that can be very uncomfortable.
Encouraging change
There’s no definitive way of encouraging a change of this scale, but with CIO-led education, enablement, and enforcement it’s certainly achievable. And once your people see the agility and quality of their work in a cloud-native environment, they’ll probably never look back again.
To see all the survey results, and get expert analysis on the challenges of cloud-native adoption, download the full research report here.
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