  This research, undertaken in highly structured software-intensive
organizations, outlines challenges associated to agile, lean and DevOps
practices and principles adoption. The approach collected data via a series of
thirty (30) interviews, with practitioners from the EMEA region (Czech
Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South
Africa, UAE, UK), working in nine (9) different industry domains and ten (10)
different countries. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles,
which organizations choose to include in their DevOps adoption journeys were
identified. The most frequently adopted structured service management
practices, contributing to DevOps practice adoption success, indicate that
those with software development and operation roles in DevOps-oriented
organizations benefit from existence of highly structured service management
approaches such as ITIL.
