What is Consulting in terms of DevOps?

First

You need to understand that many enterprises do not know much about DevOps, and that is why they hire DevOps consultants — be they just contractors, or established DevOps consultancies.

I know that this is pretty much self-explanatory, but sometimes people do not get that DevOps is not something you suck in with mother’s milk. So be ready to explain a lot in laymen terms.

Second

At the early stages of DevOps adoption, DevOps consulting generally revolves around two questions that business owners ask:

What should we as an enterprise do to kick off the DevOps transformation?

What results are we going to achieve when we are there?

Here you need to locate their pain points and provide business representatives with ways on how to soothe these pains. Then, demonstrate how their ROI and overall business results will improve when DevOps is fully on. So you have to provide some proof of DevOps success in advance to get a buy-in.

Third

DevOps consulting involves a great deal of “explanatory” work.

By this, I mean that you will have to explain business owners or other stakeholders that DevOps is a journey that involves multiple elements — from automating routine tasks to instilling DevOps culture and principles.

In other words, a DevOps consultant has to ensure that their potential client has fully realized that DevOps is a long-term transformational initiative.

DevOps consulting is about vision and guidance. You provide enterprises with a clear vision of how they are going to benefit from DevOps, then you guide them through the DevOps transformation process, and finally you educate them about such moving parts as operations, collaboration, culture, and more.

That being said, the entire DevOps consulting process generally looks like this:

• Assessment and analysis of what an enterprise has on the table from the technology perspective — “the current state” vs. “the desired state” the IT organization is striving to achieve to improve their business performance.
• Consultation — a process of determining a transformational roadmap that includes a set of initiatives needed to be done to arrive at the desired state.
• Delivery — the longest part of the consulting engagement that implies solution implementation
• Training & Coaching for hands-on engineers on DevOps best practices, tools, and techniques as well as for higher-level technical executives on how establishing DevOps culture supports business transformation