Building High-Performing IT Teams with DevOps and ITIL
By Donna Knapp, Curriculum Development Manager, ITSM Academy
What sets a high-performing IT team apart in 2025? In a word: culture.
Whether within or outside IT, any team that aims to perform at its best must establish a culture of collaboration, trust, safety, shared goals, vision and purpose, along with a commitment to continual improvement, learning, and experimentation.
This involves having an “outcome-orientated mindset” – seeing the big picture and understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing, both in terms of the organization and its customers. Hence, the leadership must provide a clear vision and strategy so that everyone knows the direction of travel and is empowered to determine how to get there.
Adopting systems thinking for IT teams – the holistic approach to problem-solving based on value streams and lean concepts – is a key success factor, as it helps ensure that any improvements will move the performance dial full cycle, not just within an individual team. This requires that teams clearly understand how their function fits into the broader process, including what comes before and after and how their work affects both.
In the early days of DevOps, organizations invested heavily in introducing Agile and DevOps practices in the ‘dev’ parts of their organization, which helped them produce code quickly. However, they soon found that if upstream business units still maintained traditional annual budgeting cycles and requirements definition methods, and downstream ‘ops’ teams still used traditional IT service management (ITSM) practices, the end-to-end lead time for making changes didn’t improve significantly.
High-performing teams understand that frameworks help clarify the “what” and “why” of the work to be done across the organization and can help speed up the adoption of these practices. These teams also recognize the need to continually adapt these ways of working as the organization matures.
However, teams still face obstacles while aiming to achieve optimal performance.
Common gaps that need filling
A major gap that remains in some IT teams today is the willingness to accept the problems associated with siloed working, as well as the ability to consider failure a learning opportunity. Even those who embrace continual improvement often plan projects rather than experiments. And the ones that experiment don’t always accept that some experiments will fail, and it’s OK.
In addition, when applying techniques such as shift left in both DevOps and ITSM, there can still be resistance to changing how and where, even if work gets done by venturing outside the organizational chart and people’s personal empires.
That’s where value stream mapping comes in. Organizations that undertake such initiatives can achieve considerable improvement as they enable all stakeholders to gain a deep understanding of how work gets done end-to-end and reach a consensus on systemic problems and constraints. For some organizations, the proposed improvements that come from such an effort can be viewed as too radical, and they remain stuck in the status quo. In others, where middle management empowers and trusts people to make needed improvements across the value stream, not just within individual teams, significant gains in performance are achieved.
Another gap is organizations' level of AI adoption. High-performing organizations treat AI as a tool to enhance human judgment and productivity, and to accelerate improvement. Rather than viewing AI as a ‘silver bullet’ that gets introduced in a siloed way or without a clear strategy, high performers give employees at all levels the confidence and capability to use it to solve real business problems.
Another gap in becoming a high-performing IT team is the tendency to think “either-or”. For example, DevOps or ITIL, stability or speed, operational efficiency or innovation. In reality, all of these are necessary and can be achieved, because that’s what customers and leaders expect.
DevOps and…
High-performing teams leverage multiple frameworks with the understanding that no single one is complete or offers a magic, one-size-fits-all solution.
Each framework plays a vital role in the end-to-end value chain and dovetailing them is what leads to high performance; for example, adapting ITIL practices to work with DevOps, thus enabling each to achieve what it needs to.
In fact, high-performing teams and organizations almost never adhere to rigid framework adoption. These organizations strive to understand the theory behind best practices, question the applicability to their organizational scenario, needs and goals, and then adapt accordingly.
Complementary techniques
What is especially valuable about the ITIL 4 guiding principles is how they reflect the core guidance and objectives of multiple frameworks, including ITSM, Agile, Lean, and DevOps. They own a characteristic of high-performing organizations, which is principles-based vs rules-based ways of working. They also highlight how each of the most widely used frameworks has something complementary to bring to a high-performing IT team.
As an example, DevOps’ approach to small incremental changes and continuous improvement based on feedback is rooted in agile and lean thinking. Combining DevOps and service management concepts fosters a customer-focused, service-oriented mindset where speed, stability and innovation are treated as shared responsibilities across the organization.
DevOps has effectively challenged the ITSM community to rethink how changes are managed and how services are supported. Traditional ITSM practices, such as a change advisory board, are mostly abandoned as organizations embrace DevOps. Changes are authorized by people as close to the work as possible or through the use of automated controls.
Incident handling has also changed. Optimally, robust monitoring and AIOps practices predict or quickly detect bugs and errors to prevent incidents. When they occur, the traditional, tiered approach to escalation has been replaced with swarming techniques and automation that ensure service is restored quickly and with minimal impact. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) passes the insights gained by running systems in production back through the value stream to improve how systems are designed, developed and delivered - including through DevOps and ITSM practices.
Perhaps the most important shifts brought about by combining ITSM and DevOps are the focus on outcome-oriented thinking and on continually optimizing and automating processes to achieve operational efficiency. This leads us to value stream management – sometimes called next gen DevOps – which makes it possible to manage the flow of value across the organization in a highly automated way and more accurately measure value realization on behalf of both the organization and its customers. Value stream management also focuses on data-driven decision making, which is a hallmark of high-performing organizations.
The high-performing teams and organizations that leverage any and all relevant frameworks are creating sustainable businesses for the long run, reskilling and reallocating rather than reducing human resources, which, in turn, enables them to focus on the next great innovation.
Bringing DevOps and ITIL together effectively
The role of education is key to ensuring leadership understanding and true collaboration between practitioners of different frameworks.
Developing a common vocabulary across communities helps improve communication, while building a culture of trust. Education also enables each community to understand the positive intentions (the why) behind the ways of working, so they can respectfully challenge them (where needed) and help improve how work is done.
Practitioners in high-performing organizations understand that this also means having to unlearn a lot. In ITSM, for example, adhering to traditional ways of working where rigour and control were non-negotiable doesn’t align with an agile/DevOps world - and is in fact quite detrimental.
This is why the evolution of ITIL 4 – with its approach to agility, its focus on value co-creation, and its emphasis on continual learning and improvement - makes it complementary with DevOps and with other adjacent frameworks that support the modern IT-enabled workplace.