There are multiple levels of influence within a company, starting from the CEO and coming down to the engineer writing code that delivers value to the customer. As a DevOps practitioner, it can sometimes become a challenge to sell ideas or benefits behind adopting a tool or automation that can help the wider team in delivering more value to the customers. This section covers some tips that you could consider to demonstrate the real value of what you are proposing. This is not easy because your level of influence as an individual contributor might not offer you a position to push ideas downwards. But the good part is that you’re in a unique position to actually implement a change at the ground level and quickly validate the idea to demonstrate tangible value. Within this scope, you can easily take the first steps around breathing life into your proposal and see if it works for you. Once it does, it’s time to push it forward. Let’s discuss a few things that will help you sell your DevOps ideas higher up in the organizational chain.
Structure your ideas well
Don’t start with the deepest technical implementation details when describing your ideas. Focus on the value it provides and how that leads to success. If you’ve built a tool that injects failures into various components of the architecture stack to test their resiliency, make sure you highlight the value all your customers get by adopting this approach. While this certainly helps the software developers test the resiliency of their application stack and how the code behaves during disasters, it ultimately benefits the end customers as well since the application they use will be more reliable and sustain the unexpected scenarios quite well.
Demonstrate commitment
Develop a proof of concept (PoC) that works end-to-end and demonstrates the benefits of using it. This shows that you are committed to the idea and will not leave it unfinished. Furthermore, by doing this, you either reduce or completely remove the potential risk of something resulting in a wasted effort for the stakeholder. It makes it a lot easier to get buy-in and experience the idea in a working form.