“Devops” traded less bureaucracy for more accountability.

Have a generalist ops team that is staffed 24x7, or has paid on call as part of the job. They get run books to respond to whatever goes on.

I’ve set this up twice. The first time, we had a team in the Philippines that would cover overnights.

They could start and rollback deployments and do most stuff via the runbook they were provided. Most callouts (5% of escalations) to product teams were due to bad or missing documentation.

The US based team did similar work, just during the day. Both could escalate quality issues for the product team to fix.

The other model was all US, on-call based. We used junior and low-skill folks, who had rotating on-call. They were paid 20% of hourly rate for standby pay and had a minimum pay threshold when they got called. All of that hit the cost center of the offending product or service, so there was both a financial incentive to not get calls, and a human incentive as the engineers didn’t want to get called for escalations. Again, documentation is key.