Are you ready to take project delivery forward using a DevOps methodology?
Or is it still a trend yet to be worthy of investment?
DevOps uses Agile and lean principles, bringing priorities together from inception to delivery.
Serocor Projects strongly believes the future of technology deployment lives with a DevOps methodology, the question is “how do you set your team up for success when managing DevOps projects?”
We have put together some pointers below to support your organisation in getting started, if you feel more conversation or support may be required then drop us a line at Info@SerocorProjects.com, we’d be only too happy to collaborate with you and provide support where it’s needed.
1. Start small – big bang doesn’t work.
Allow your team to work on a small project, to begin with, let them understand and get a sense of how it works.
Working on a real project will give a better understanding than reading a book or taking a course, although naturally, they will a formal understanding, to begin with.
Allow the team to develop what works culturally within your organisation from a DevOps point of view, all the things that make your company unique must be considered when taking on a new methodology.
2. Toolset – Don’t try and fit a square peg in a round hole.
Using a toolset that is all about collaboration and breaking down silos is key. The focus should be on collaboration, communication and reducing overheads so finding the right toolset that will assure these principles is vital. Success will be attributable to the tooling used – making good choices will add value. When looking go for the right toolset you need to consider how the tooling will simplify configuration management, application deployment, monitoring and version control.
3. Improve flow and integration – remove Silos.
Improving flow and integration is the cornerstone of exemplar DevOps teams, making sure development and operations move quickly is critical and the best way to do that is to reduce down the number of silos a team has to navigate, cross-functional capability is the key – cut across the pillars that support the silos and tap into that cross-collaborative capability.
Incentivising the right behaviours will ultimately result in successfully breaking down silos, ensure teams are targeted and rewarded as they work toward a common theme or goal, team members and stakeholders need to be incentivised across all areas of work and not just specifically one single project.
4. MVP – the Minimum Viable Product is key.
If you’re not using an MVP approach yet then start… MVP is highly effective and extremely useful, even within a small project. The team need to be focused on reducing risk and high return values, by creating a MVP approach teams and Product owners can create products that can be deployed quickly and measure targeted feedback. If you can ensure that in line with MVP you can reduce the handoffs or touchpoints between multiple teams then the flow and accountability increase significantly.
5. Real-time reporting- everyone having visibility of where the project stands are critical on so many levels.
Creating an environment of real-time visibility and reporting may be last on our list but by no way interpret it as low on our priorities list. Giving all interested parties access to project visibility is of paramount importance, understanding project or product status will undeniably reduce unnecessary noise and anxiety related to project deployment.
We believe that if teams use the right reporting packages then overheads can be monitored and reduced as a result. Teams can demonstrate that by cutting back on the number of meetings they would traditionally need to attend and by eliminating the need to write lengthy status reports then this will have an immediate and very apparent effect on the time teams have to develop the MVP and deal with change. By investing in this approach and the people who need to implement it companies will reduce their staff attrition levels, staff will be engaged and feel valued, change will be collaborative and proactive development will sweep through the entire organisation almost as a result of success envy.
Having an engaged workforce who believe their employer is invested in them and their success will ensure that projects delivered will have a closer relationship to the needs of the operational teams through cross-functional and collaborative engagement.
If you’re interested in understanding where your organisation is right now, how prepared they are to move into a DevOps environment and what the steps to make that move would be then contact us, we can perform a simple assessment of your workforce and practices and deliver a real line in the sand from which you can understand what (if anything) you need to do next.
Comments are closed.