Breaking the mould: the rise of DevOps at KPMG

Lead DevOps engineer Ariane Gadd on building an Agile startup within the consultancy giant

When it comes to hiring talented engineers, consultancy KPMG has an initial hurdle to overcome.

"Many people don't realise KPMG has tech capabilities", said lead DevOps engineer Ariane Gadd. "They think we're accountants, auditors and tax experts."

A good example of the aphorism that ‘every company is a software company now', for the past four years or so KPMG has been building its team of client-facing DevOps engineers, going from just three people to more than 100 now. These DevOps engineers work on projects for clients, such as the Tesco compensation scheme completed in 2017. Having technology capabilities gives KPMG another string to its bow, said Gadd, who joined in 2015 as part of a cloud migration project.

"Our consultants will go out to clients about a problem that the client is having, and they find a lot of the solutions are underpinned by technology. So, then they come to us."

On average, a project will take between six and 12 months to complete, after which KPMG engineers remain on hand to provide second- or third-line support. "we've got fast lane engineers that would initially triage anything, but any application or infrastructure issues would come to us."

With the number of tech projects mounting up, it's important to manage the support process carefully. KPMG uses a combination of ServiceNow and Jira to handle support tickets, with those tools feeding into Pager Duty to coordinate escalation schedules - and to prevent the engineers from becoming overloaded.

Gadd is one of a small number of engineers who are generally on call and liable to receive the dreaded 4 am message that something has gone down. "Yeah, it happens," she said, "but it's a lot better now because there's just one number that rings and I can bring in a lot more engineers, rather than it possibly being anyone who knows my mobile number."

The thing about DevOps is it's really easy to learn if you have a technology background

While there are pockets of specialism, and some, like Gadd, have special responsibilities, the KPMG team all have the same basic job title: DevOps engineer.

"The thing about DevOps is it's really easy to learn if you have a technology background with a bit of programming and infrastructure and cloud," she said. "Rather than having a separate team for infrastructure, or networking or security, we wanted to combine everything into one team where we would build that infrastructure in the cloud using as much automation scripting as possible."

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The team has been built up partly through internal promotions and partly through hiring, to become a centre of excellence for Agile and cloud that can be drawn on by other teams within KPMG. In turn, they also draw on security and networking expertise from other parts of the business.

So, have things become easier or more difficult as DevOps in KPMG has grown from internal startup to centre of excellence?

"Well, it's easier and harder," Gadd said.

The fact that many of the old security tasks such as patching and upgrading are now handled automatically by scripts and procedures built in house has certainly reduced the drudgery, allowing developers to get on with writing new code, but at the same time maturity brings its own obligations, including the need to formally document the code and to pay more attention to security.

"There is a lot more red tape around it, a lot of restrictions on what we can use. Whereas initially, when we're setting things up, we would choose the tools and technologies we wanted to use, now we tend to have that pushed to us by a centralised security team."

On the plus side, the team has earned a reputation within KPMG for getting things done.

People realise we are breaking the mould and we are kind of like a startup

"We did DevOps from the beginning, and we were very Agile. And as we grew, as we took on more projects, people around the firm started to see what we were doing. We were pulled into various different areas to help them with DevOps, to help them with using technologies to bring things out to market a lot quicker. So, it was really positive for us, because a lot of pockets around the firm that were trying to do Agile, they could reach out to us because we can actually prove that we're doing it in practice and we're doing it successfully."

And as awareness has grown, so it has become easier to attract DevOps talent.

"Now I think we've got out to the market, and people realise we are breaking the mould and we are kind of like a startup. It was hard at first, but now we've got the message out there that we are doing technology, and we're doing pretty well."