In my previous post, I discussed the notion of a DevOps Management Organization or DOMO. As I said there, this is and idea that is showing up under different names at shops of varying sizes. I thought I would share a drawing of one to serve as an example. The basic structure is, of course, a matrix organization with the ability to have each key role present within the project. It also provides for shared infrastructure services such as support and data. You could reasonably easily replace the Business Analyst (BA) role with a Product Owner / Product Manager role and change “Project” to “Product” and have a variant of this structure that I have seen implemented at a couple of SaaS providers around Austin.
This structure does assume a level of maturity in the organization as well as the underlying infrastructure. It is useful to note that the platform is designated as a “DevOps Platform”. It would probably be better to phrase that as a cloud-type platform – public, private or hybrid – where the permanence of a particular image is low, but the consistency and automation is high. To be sure, not all environments have built such an infrastructure, but many, if not most, are building them aggressively. The best time to look at the organization is while those infrastructures are being built and companies are looking for the best ways to exploit them.