Why DevOps transformations fail

Most organisations don’t fail DevOps because of technology. They fail because they treat DevOps as a toolset instead of an operating model.

After years delivering DevOps programmes in finance, insurance and retail, we see the same patterns repeat.

The Common Failure Points

1. Tooling before outcomes
Teams buy pipelines, monitoring and Kubernetes before defining what “good” looks like: lead time, release frequency, reliability.

2. Central teams with no product ownership
A DevOps team serving hundreds of apps becomes a ticket factory instead of an enabler.

3. Ignoring data & testing
Automation without quality gates simply releases bad code faster.

A Practical Approach

• Start with value streams, not technology

• Create platform engineering capabilities as products

• Embed SRE practices early

• Measure four metrics:

  • Deployment frequency

  • Lead time

  • Change failure rate

  • MTTR

The 90-Day Plan

• Weeks 1–2: Assessment, value stream mapping

• Weeks 3–6: CI/CD foundations, environments as code

• Weeks 7–10: Automated testing & security

• Weeks 11–12: Observability and release governance

DevOps is about flow and feedback. Get those right and the tooling follows naturally.

Lavoro DevOps