DEVOPS LIFE CYCLE

The DevOps Life Cycle initiative spanned roughly 9 months and impacted the development practices of Star Citizen across multiple studios. With any endeavor, I begin with a 'Use Case' to answer the question of 'why'. Iniatives aren't simply projects, they have to align to an overarching goal for an organization. These are called "Objectives and Key Results" aka OKRs. Given that an organization has a clearly defined mission and vision for their product, I guide leadership through a series of questions geared towards proving that the 'Use Case' aligns or doesn't align to the organization vision. A Use Case typically consists of Market Analysis and or a Problem to solve. In their basic form, they are structured as follows: • Description of what is being presented (Market Analysis or Problem in need of a solution) • Problem Statement • Solution Statement • Hypothesis • Business Impact Historically, Star Citizen and Squadron 42 were consistently missing their deadlines and coming up short regarding their commitments. The problem is clearly defined. My team then identified each stakeholder and their sphere of influence for each game. This is where we understand pain points and begin analysis. Once I understood each stakeholder, I identfied subject matter experts (SME) for each pillar of game dev. The SME would be initial change agents that would eventually evangelize and advocate on my behalf as my team and I began to provide solutions. My team established an "update" meeting cadence scheduled every two weeks, and a regular 'email update" campaign outlining requirements and expectations. It was at this point that I encouraged Directors and Producers to own the creation of the new DevOps pipeline by engaging with 60+ producers through meetings, Slack, and Email. Th intent was to understand how they would be affected positively and negatively by proposed changes (Change Management). We outlined the following plan: • Stakeholder list and 'sphere of influence' • Requirements for each pillar • Objectives and key results • Key performance indicators • Risk register and risk management board • Jira product instance with heirarchy issue types to manage execution • Inputs and outputs • Defined roles and expectations throughout development and publishing Upon approval, we facilitated the identification of each individual contributor and mapped their name, inputs, and outputs to each action point on the DevOps pipeline. My team and I then coordinated with Directors and Producers to implement the changes and evangelize downwards and upwards as we began tracking OKRs and KPIs for each team.