Agile and DevOps — Essentials in the Digital Transformation Journey
Bringing Your Modern Software Factory to Life — By Ayman Sayed
Digital transformation is key to the success of any company operating in today’s business landscape and agile and DevOps are essential components for a successful journey. Employing these practices will help companies move to the head of the pack by improving speed, overall collaboration and the customer experience.
Recently, CA commissioned a global survey by Freeform Dynamics of more than 1,200 IT leaders around the topics of agile and DevOps titled, “How Agile and DevOps Enable Digital Readiness and Transformation.” The survey highlights the benefits of fully deploying both agile and DevOps practices throughout an organization. It also sheds light on adoption challenges and key hurdles that organizations are finding difficult to overcome — culture, skills, program investment and leadership alignment.
As companies adapt to compete in today’s dynamic marketplace, leaders need to be aggressive and intentional about driving adoption of agile and DevOps within their organizations. The success of their business depends on it. These are a few things that organizations need to keep in mind as they shift focus on driving these methodologies within their organization:
Improve Culture
The culture of an organization is key to successful implementation of agile and DevOps. A company environment needs to encourage and reward collaboration, fostering an environment where teamwork and agility is top-of-mind. This will help ensure that organizations maintain an environment that allows for agility and DevOps to be at the core of operations. Part of improving team culture is revising current processes. It is important to make sure the stakeholders are identified at the beginning so they can make valuable contributions, but it is also beneficial to include customers throughout the process so that feedback can be incorporated throughout the development process.
Management Commitment
For agility and collaboration to be successful, leadership at all levels needs to encourage and support it among employees — and leaders themselves must embody this way of working to lead by example. Implementing agility across the software lifecycle isn’t just a matter of new skills — it also requires a significant shift in mindset and behavior, and support of that needs to come from the top, which allows teams to be more receptive to the changes being asked of them.
Training
IT teams have the most opportunity to be successful when they are given the opportunity to incorporate best practices into their day-to-day jobs and utilize additional resources to help implement agile and DevOps. By providing the proper training for employees, companies are more likely to see these practices being utilized across the organization, which according to the research results, could amount to a 60% higher rate of revenue and profit growth than organizations that do not utilize agile and DevOps.
Relieve Time Pressures
The study showcases characteristics of ‘Agility Masters’ (the top 18%), which are organizations that are farthest along in the full adoption and doing most or nearly all of the right things to make agile and DevOps an essential part of how they function daily. Part of ensuring that employees can focus on the right work is giving them the ability to ruthlessly prioritize the most strategic work to be done, so they can focus on finishing faster, vs. juggling competing work, or doing work that may not ultimately drive towards the organizational strategy. To fully embrace agile and DevOps practices, companies need to be able to allow employees to prioritize their work and fully adopt these methodologies.
Agility and DevOps are fundamentals of a Modern Software Factory and although they will not solve all software development problems, they are essential in addressing how companies can improve their engagement with customers and key business stakeholders. These practices will also help organizations keep up with the continuously changing, and unpredictable, business environment.
Ayman is president and chief product officer at CA, responsible for the strategy and development of CA’s full portfolio of Enterprise products and solutions. His mandate is to focus on building a differentiated product portfolio meant to help CA customers solve their most difficult business problems in the application economy. http://ow.ly/VHET50gGBUb
