The devops handbook how to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations By Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis

Ops liaison
model and with fewer 
people.” 
Farrall defined two types of Ops liaisons: the business relationship manager 
and the dedicated release engineer. The business relationship managers 
worked with product management, line-of-business owners, project manage-
ment, Dev management, and developers. They became intimately familiar 
with product group business drivers and product road maps, acted as advocates 
for product owners inside of Operations, and helped their product teams 
navigate the Operations landscape to prioritize and streamline work 
requests.
Similarly, the dedicated release engineer became intimately familiar with the 
product’s Development and QA issues, and helped them get what they needed 
from the Ops organization to achieve their goals. They were familiar with the 
typical Dev and QA requests for Ops, and would often execute the needed 
work themselves. As needed, they would also pull in dedicated technical Ops 
engineers (e.g., DBAs, Infosec, storage engineers, network engineers), and 
help determine which self-service tools the entire Operations group should 
prioritize building.
By doing this, Farrall was able to help Dev teams across the organization 
become more productive and achieve their team goals. Furthermore, he helped 
the teams prioritize around his global Ops constraints, reducing the number 
of surprises discovered mid-project and ultimately increasing the overall 
project throughput. 
Farrall notes that both working relationships with Operations and code release 
velocity were noticeably improved as a result of the changes. He concludes, 
“The Ops liaison model allowed us to embed IT Operations expertise into the 
Dev and Product teams without adding new headcount.”
The DevOps transformation at Big Fish Games shows how a centralized Op-
erations team was able to achieve the outcomes typically associated with 
market-oriented teams. We can employ the three following broad 
strategies: 
Promo 
- Not 
for 
distribution 
or 
sale

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