Agile IT: secret sister of the DevOps movement
This post is an introduction to “Agile IT”, an approach to IT Services that mandates for both end users and admins:
- systems should work and scale transparently
- systems should proactively prevent wasted time
- systems should allow collaboration across time & space
- systems should require minimal expertise to operate
Agile IT’s origin story
I’m a fan of the DevOps model. I don’t get to interact with developers as often as I used to, but I do get to practice a sister model for IT Services that was developed while ThoughtWorks worked out the kinks in the DevOps model.
The acceptance and popularity of DevOps is a very public result from ThoughtWorks’ efforts in those days, but internally I and other team members worked on ‘Agile IT’: a way to bring the principles of Agile and Lean software development to the practice of IT Services and Support.
The details of this movement weren’t shared with the public, and at the time followed Lean development principles. Where DevOps focused on the continuous delivery of iterative systems development, Agile IT did the same for IT Services and Support. The idea was to chip away at IT Services support and infrastructure, iterating on processes & systems, and implementing automation and improvement where we could.
There were some areas that didn’t fit well: daily standups for support staff weren’t super productive, but overall it went quite well. Using specific projects as demonstrations, I trained IT staff from Chicago to Mumbai on Agile IT.
I started having kids, and it’s hard to move to Mumbai for a month at a time when that happens, so I left to pursue the future of Agile IT with US-based companies. I’ve been continuing the charge of Agile IT, incorporating new technologies as they come online. SaaS products and their self-hosted counterparts have supercharged Agile IT in the last 5 years, and I’m excited to see what opportunities lie ahead.
Agile IT sounds like a no-brainer for a modern IT Services organization, but like everything else, the devil is in the details. I’ll focus on the “four pillars” of Agile IT in upcoming posts, and link them in the list first mentioned here.
