Why does it seem that the volume of requirements from the
business is increasing and our ability to deliver is not matching up to expectations? Is there something from an IT perspective that we are doing
wrong?
More often than not the needs of our business are
changing at a rapid rate. As a result our scalability on the way we can
handle these demands has not changed effectively over the same period of time. Taking a closer look at the processes we currently
have in place we might categorize them as appropriate to deliver exceptional service. However since the business has changed over time IT has not
adapted in the way they manage business requests. The execution of processes
is not as streamlined as it could be and as a result produce results which
from the business perspective are less than satisfactory. When Development and Operations teams take a
closer look at the overall delivery they may be quick to blame the other team for any bottlenecks. This “Us
and Them” mentality is part of the problem that may exist.
The DevOps methodology looks to improve upon this. In essence DevOps attempts
to enable development and operations teams to improve communication and collaboration
with each other for the betterment of service delivery through the breaking
down of silos where they may exist.
Typically organizations which are not leveraging
DevOps, have challenges with regards to something being developed and deployed in relative isolation. The
common complaint here is that once it is ready for production, operations raises
issues with a piece of development for whatever reason citing, “this can’t
work in a production environment in this manner, this needs to be fixed”. Development then takes this back to
task which in turn adds some timeline to the project. This addition of time and
rework comes at a price, not only from a financial perspective but our business
sees this as another delayed project delivered from IT.
This is not strictly a development problem or accountability. The Operations
teams need to ensure that they are at the table at the beginning to make sure
that the requirements they have for operational delivery will be reviewed long
before the move to production. They are just as accountable for the timely
implementation of this project as well. This is after all an IT solution we are
delivering so working together as an IT team is pretty important.
If you do any reading on the subject, DevOps can improve
delivery efficiencies through faster releases with fewer errors, however
implementing this isn’t as simple as all that. You culturally need to be in a
position to manage this effectively. Delivering these releases continuously in an agile way
may be something that is easier for a smaller organization rather than an
enterprise one. You may have heard the term “Two Pizza Teams” which refers to smaller
teams which could share 2 pizzas.
Start to think about what makes sense to your
organization both from the perspectives of both your IT teams and business needs. Take away the
components of this methodology that work for you and use them to help improve your
service delivery. At the very least improving the communication and collaboration
within your IT teams will net some positive results. In starting these
discussions you may identify the common bottlenecks which impede you from timely
delivery of new services. These results might have been obvious to operations and development separately but until they are
discussed they are not going to change. Use your findings as a base for future
improvements.
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Labels: Continual Service Improvement, DevOps, Service Delivery