Nearly every company today is an IT-company. But not all of them are as agile as they should be. Agile and DevOps are used interchangeable, but are they really? Can you work truly agile without a DevOps way of working? In our opinion: NO! But to become more agile, just implementing DevOps won’t do the trick.
A lot of companies still are bound by legacy technology and ‘vertical silos’, with a lot of horizontal management and control layers that hold them back. Meanwhile the numbers show that agility and DevOps bring better results: deployments of new apps and functions are happening ten times faster, as does the rate of troubleshooting. More important, the success rate of deployments is much higher as when working in the vertical silos.
So why aren’t all companies agile yet? Well, it is not always that easy to transform an organisation. It is not just a matter of combining Development and Operations and start working in sprints with stickies on the wall, or give the Development department access to production and setup automation.
Don’t forget the others
For a transformation to be a success, it has to be carried by the entire organisation. Not just the departments that will see the direct benefits of it, but also the supporting departments, like Human Recourses or the financial department. Teams will be affected by them as well, for instance when it comes to budget management, workhours registration or allocation of employees.
One of the things we often see, is that when there is a will to transform companies feel it has to be done for the entire organisation directly. From our experience we can tell you: that is risky, because it can have a too big of an impact on your daily operations and innovation capacity.
At Simtech we have seen that legacy infrastructure can often get in the way of a transformation initiative and break spirits. While we can help you create a state of the art IT infrastructure to facilitate your transformation, it might sometimes be enough to update your current Infrastructure, to transform the way you work. It’s important to decouple your IT-services, so that they can be independently developed and released. Infrastructure agility and a lean approach to IT service management will be key drivers to your agile transformation to boost the spirit of those starting the initiative.
Start small, believers!
Through the years we have seen that the best way to start a cultural change, is to start with a small group of believers – evangelists if you will – from all departments that can work on a small project that is independent of the daily production. Where through inspiring leadership the new vision can grow and thrive and you take control in your own hands.
The hardest part of transforming an organisation isn’t changing the technology, it is changing the culture within the organisation. That requires help and a vision. Simply saying ‘we need to’ is not enough. You have to take the whole organisation on this revolution. But as history has showed, all revolutions start small and with believers. Give them the space in your organisation, the right tools and the rest will follow.
