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How do you improve DevOps collaboration practices across teams?
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We're struggling with silos between dev, ops, and security teams. Our DevOps collaboration practices need serious improvement.
What tools and processes have you found most effective for breaking down these barriers? I'm particularly interested in how you handle communication, shared responsibilities, and decision-making processes.
Do you use specific collaboration platforms, regular sync meetings, or documentation practices that actually work? Looking for practical advice that goes beyond just saying "communicate better."
Improving DevOps collaboration practices starts with shared goals and metrics. We created joint OKRs between dev, ops, and security teams. Everyone's bonus depends on the same outcomes like deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery.
We also do regular blameless postmortems" where teams analyze incidents together without pointing fingers. This builds trust and helps everyone understand each other's challenges.
For tools, we use Slack channels dedicated to specific services where all teams can see what's happening. Not just alerts, but also deployment announcements, planned maintenance, and discussions about improvements.
We struggled with DevOps collaboration practices too until we implemented you build it, you run it." Developers are responsible for their services in production, which forces collaboration because they need ops expertise.
We also created cross-functional teams with members from dev, ops, and security. Each team owns a set of services end-to-end. This breaks down silos naturally because people are working together daily.
For communication, we use Notion for documentation and Confluence is banned. Notion's real-time collaboration features actually get used, unlike our old Confluence pages that nobody updated.
One of the most effective DevOps collaboration practices we implemented was architecture review boards" with representatives from all teams. Any significant change requires review from dev, ops, and security perspectives.
We also do joint on-call rotations. Developers and ops engineers share pager duty for their services. This builds empathy and knowledge sharing - developers learn about operational concerns, and ops engineers understand the code better.
For decision making, we use RFCs (Request for Comments) where anyone can propose changes. The discussions happen openly, and decisions are documented with the reasoning behind them.
As someone who manages remote teams, I'll add that DevOps collaboration practices need to account for different time zones and communication styles. We use async communication heavily - recorded video updates, detailed written documentation, and tools that don't require everyone to be online at the same time.
We also have virtual coffee chats" randomly pairing team members from different functions. These informal conversations help build relationships that make formal collaboration easier.
The key is creating multiple channels for communication - some synchronous, some asynchronous, some formal, some informal. Different people prefer different styles, and you need to support them all.
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