Agile + DevOps – The Road Ahead – Part 2

If one has to deconstruct this new world of Agile and DevOps – it is interesting to note that both are explorative and experimentation of sorts!  Our previous blog post – Agile+DevOps: New Roads, New Wheels & the art of Continuous Learning – Part 1, by Rajendra Prasad Thota, Practice Head – Advisory & Transformation Services at Cigniti, discussed how an IT organization should identify the critical challenges and right organizational change levers that need to be deployed in creating and delivering the value.

DevOps is not about simply collapsing two different teams or departments into a single boundary-less entity and pushing them to find a meaningful relationship – voila! and the magic happens. Well, it is not. At least, not that easy. For the two to come together, first there must be the right place [Org. Structure] to hold them. It doesn’t happen automatically.

So, what are the pillars and bridges of Dev & Ops?

In continuation to his previous post, Rajendra Prasad Thota, in this post, throws light on few more challenges in going from point A to Point B, Organizational change management, the last mile challenge and how a comprehensive assessment for agile / DevOps can help the transformation journey.

An organizational re-design is the key to hold the new structures and teams together to design, build and deliver the value continuously. Now the fusion of roles and responsibilities is another thing to be worked at. New wheels, new teams don’t work together unless they are trained / upskilled in new tools, new ways of working, new processes. And, new metrics that measures their work. Hence, it becomes imperative to kick off the perpetual training engine that can constantly upskill / train teams to fully exploit these new tracks!

As we know, the DevOps world builds on the principles of CAMS [Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing]. M – the measure is the real key to drive not just decisions, but the new behaviors too. How a sprint velocity is measured and tracked determines teams’ new learning and the way the productivity is shown. How a cycle time is measured and tracked will influence the behaviors of teams in exploiting the constraints and bringing in accelerators like code analysis, automated environment provisioning, automated deployment, etc. into the game. How the backlogs get transformed into business value determines the ways they are groomed and prioritized to realize the dollar value and can even stop the irrelevant change requests in their tracks! Well, the metrics should be meaningful and may not just focus just on the speed / number of deploys, but more importantly to track the flow and whether ‘right’ value is delivered at the right time.

We have met the enemy. It is us! [From The Phoenix Project]

It is a no-brainer that any major initiative will fail if ‘people practices’ are found wanting in the first place. Rightly said, the first obstacle to any change initiative is mostly within the teams itself. It all boils down to the culture of change. And, the DevOps world has put the ‘C’- Culture thing in the right place, the beginning [CAMS]! In the days of culture eats strategy for breakfast, it is hyper critical that a well thought out change management strategy should be in place before even embarking on this transformative journey. Like any ‘change the world’ initiative, the culture here too is the pivot of success.

Read the full post here – Agile + DevOps – The Road Ahead – Part 2. Raj (as he is popularly known) describes the critical factors for getting the wheels of speed and quality into action in this post.