DevOps – The future

After the success of different methodologies, with the convergence of technology and those who maintain technologies, DevOps holds the future for lean IT Management.

Some of the challenges for its success –

Where are the failures?

IT Management processes like CoBIT, ITIL, ISO20000, Agile, Waterfall depends a lot on identifying tasks and grouping them into management processes. And this would be followed by expertise and skill-sets integrated into the IT team structures. For strategizing mid-sized teams this approach is expensive and failure points spread across extended time periods. Hence, the IT management finds it challenging to set expectations with the board.

With DevOps, the failure points get curtailed and every failure becomes a stepping stone within short time frames. The flexibility to swerve increases rapidly with DevOps. The team’s success is more dependent on balancing the success and failures and not just aiming for success.

Team Management advantages.

The time gaps from development to production can be cut short tremendously and with small teams taking ownership throughout the life cycle, business users don’t have to spend (or waste) time with different IT professionals from requirements to production.

The sense of ownership increases manifold with the DevOps team and performance management KPIs for the DevOps team members can be developed easily and would be clearer. It’s no more about setting tough, challenging and sometimes incomprehensible indeces across project managers, architects and developers.

Skill development efforts can be focused on leveling the playing field rather than strategizing the team members to compete. This is a great positive for collaboration.

Cost of adoption and decommissioning.

The cost of adopting and upscaling can be phenomenally lower considering the higher cost of streamlined processes like ITIL. Everyone upscales as a team with low cost to the company. Hence a kick-off for DevOps has a very less cost and at the same time discarding it also won’t cost as much as even the Agile method. This can be the most important economic benefit.

Success factors.

The success factors would depend largely in integrating technology, processes, automation, and support by a few good men rather than a large team of experts pooled together. This works well when all the expertise is stacked up within the team and the team members are able to close the work items across different areas quickly.

Brainstorm->Agree->Action. No presentations, no diplomacy, mince no words.

Fail to succeed!