gettyDevOps is designed to help software teams deliver faster and more reliably by improving collaboration, automation and shared ownership across development and operations. But as organizations scale, even a well-planned DevOps initiative can drift from its original purpose and start creating the very silos, inefficiencies and bottlenecks it was meant to remove.The early warning signs aren’t always obvious, which is why leaders need to pay close attention to whether DevOps is still supporting both technical performance and business goals. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share signs that a DevOps initiative is no longer working as intended and what leaders can do to get it back on track.Pipeline Automation That Creates FrictionThe quiet warning sign? When engineers dread the pipeline they built. Automation that was meant to liberate becomes a maze of fragile scripts and blame-shifting alerts. DevOps has lost its soul. Leaders must stop adding tools and start asking hard questions—walk the workflow, remove fear from postmortems and rebuild the one thing no dashboard measures: team confidence. - Bindu Madhavi Mangalampalli, CotivitiMetrics That Overshadow Business ValueA DevOps initiative drifts when teams spend more time measuring coding and dev activity than impact to the business and its customers. Deployment metrics, dashboards and pipeline automation matter only if they improve reliability, issue resolution or customer experience. The scorecard must be continually simplified and teams realigned around a common value stream. The goal is not greater release volume; it is better value chain flow, quality and accountability. - Rush LaSelle, Fathom Digital ManufacturingForbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?Engineers Bypassing The Official PipelineThe clearest sign: Your own engineers start routing around the pipeline. Manual hotfixes, side scripts and “just this once” exceptions become routine. The official path stopped being the fast one. How to fix it: Treat your platform like a product and engineers as its customers. Find the friction that made the workaround faster and kill it. Make the right way the easy way. - Ilan Rakhmanov, ChainGPTFast Deployments With Poor Production OutcomesThe signal: Models ship faster but drift, hallucinations and rollback rates climb together. Teams confuse deployment velocity with delivered value. Fix it by anchoring on outcome metrics, production accuracy, drift detection time and business KPI lift, not release counts. Audit which MLOps automations cut toil versus which just shifted work to data scientists. - Dr. Chiranjiv Roy, C5i.aiFaster Releases With Higher Failure RatesThe tell is deployment frequency climbing while the change failure rate climbs with it and recovery time stretches out. You’re moving faster and breaking more, usually because the bottleneck moved downstream into testing and operations. To reset, baseline the four metrics that matter, run one targeted change on a team or two, and scale only what moved the numbers. - Preetpal Singh, XebiaA DevOps Team Turned Ticket QueueIf an organization’s DevOps initiative has morphed into a silo, it’s time to pivot and realign and stop treating the DevOps team as a ticket-clearing queue for deployment requests. Instead, task them with building an internal developer platform to create self-service tools and automated pipelines that allow developers to deploy their own code safely. - Dr. Jeremy Nunn, WorkmetricsAI-Driven Speed That Shifts BottlenecksThe sign: AI has cleared one bottleneck but silently created another. DevOps is a system that routes around its slowest stage. Speed up coding tenfold, and the queue moves to review, then CI/CD, then security drowning in AI findings, then SRE absorbing the blast from faster changes. Stop measuring the stage AI sped up. Measure flow across the whole value stream, find the new constraint, invest there and repeat. - TK Keanini, DNSFilterA Slowdown In Automated ReleasesA sign that a DevOps initiative is failing is when software releases take longer and need frequent hotfixes. A team that deployed every day now releases monthly because automated testing is unreliable and deployments need manual steps. Leaders should identify bottlenecks, fix automation, improve testing and strengthen collaboration between development and operations teams to restore faster, more reliable delivery. - Franky Joy, Lane AutomotiveEngineering Teams Losing Trust In DevOpsDevOps is usually a small team carrying the most critical lines of business. The moment engineering loses trust—over speed, quality, collaboration or dependency—that’s a crack a leader has to address fast. Don’t fix it with headcount. Get both teams in a room, clear the worst blockers and reset ownership. Keep DevOps lean and collaborative, supporting the organization at the last mile. - Harshil Shah, DXFactorGovernance That Slows DeliveryDevOps loses effectiveness when governance outweighs outcomes. Controls and standards are essential, but too much process can slow delivery and disconnect teams from business value. The goal should be balance and governance that enables speed, quality and measurable results. - William Donlan, Astound DigitalStrong Team Metrics With Weak Product OutcomesThe surest sign a DevOps initiative has collapsed is when teams celebrate local metrics while organizational outcomes quietly erode. Velocity climbs; reliability suffers. When every team is winning and the product is losing, you’ve optimized the wrong thing. Dissolve the silo metrics. Rebuild dashboards around shared outcomes—deployment stability, customer impact and revenue continuity. - Nitesh Sinha, SacumenPipeline Sprawl That Reduces VisibilityPipeline sprawl is a warning sign to watch out for. A DevOps initiative is losing effectiveness when pipelines proliferate without consistent standards, tagging or ownership. The result is reduced visibility, weaker governance and higher operational risk. Leaders should enforce standardized templates, mandatory metadata and clear ownership to restore control without sacrificing speed. - Subasini Periyakaruppan, Cadmus GroupHigh PR Volume With Slow Lead TimesA major sign of failure is surging lead times for changes despite high pull request volume, which means teams are writing code fast, but it bottlenecks at testing and deployment. To fix it, leaders must stop measuring raw output. Transition to AI-driven automated triage and testing to sweep away manual approval blockers, clearing the path from development straight to production. - Vaibhav Misra, Capital OnePlatform Teams Have Become Delivery GatekeepersThe sign: a “DevOps” team that does neither Dev nor Ops—it owns tooling and polices standards but never ships product or carries the pager. Policing without owning the outcome is how the old IT wall comes back, renamed. A real platform team is self-service that you pull from; this one is a gate you queue at. Re-embed delivery ownership in the teams that ship and measure wait time, not deployment counts. - Song Bac Toh, Dell TechnologiesTool Sprawl That Burns Out DevelopersDev teams are burning out because software engineers have become part-time cloud infrastructure engineers. When DevOps degrades, developers waste up to 15 hours a week switching between a dozen disconnected testing, security and monitoring tools. This fragmented process kills focus and stops them from delivering features. - Neil Lampton, TIAGDevOps That Slows Value DeliveryOne sign a DevOps initiative is off track is when it slows value delivery instead of accelerating it. Leaders should realign DevOps to business outcomes and measure success by the speed of innovation, customer impact and flow of value, not just deployment metrics or tooling adoption. - Nirab Kumar, Odyssey LogisticsAutomated Pipelines With Human BottlenecksA clear sign is when teams optimize the pipeline but still wait on people. If deployments are automated but approvals, handoffs and unclear ownership create delays, DevOps has become tooling theater. Leaders should map the real flow of work and remove the human bottlenecks first. - Nirmal Jingar, WayfairDevOps Processes That Create FrictionThe clearest sign is when teams spend more energy navigating the DevOps system than benefiting from it. Every transformation begins by removing friction, yet over time, processes, controls and tools can become friction themselves. Leaders should not ask whether teams follow the process but whether the process still accelerates learning, delivery and business value. When it doesn’t, redesign it. - Motaz Agamawi, PwCLarger Releases Driven By Deployment FearOne telling sign is when deployment frequency declines while release sizes grow, meaning teams have quietly reverted to batch-shipping out of fear. Leaders should identify where bottlenecks crept back in, restore psychological safety around small failures, and rebuild the feedback loops that make frequent, low-risk deployment feel sustainable. - Dennis-Kenji Kipker, cyberintelligence.instituteFragmented Ownership And Finger-PointingOne sign: Ownership has fragmented. When something breaks, teams point fingers instead of fixing it, and “you build it, you run it” has quietly eroded. Leaders should restore clear end-to-end accountability, align on-call and incident response with the teams that ship the code, and rebuild a blameless culture. - Michael Flickinger, Bizowie