The transformation of product development with DevOps and agile methods only promises success when decision makers approach it company-wide.
Many companies rely on agile software development and DevOps structures in their digital transformation. Too often, however, they assign teams that are too small for this and thus set limits to their success from the outset.
In practice, seven approaches have proven themselves:
- Work on cultural change
- Measure progress
- Limit yourself to a few tools
- Ensuring security and governance
- Train employees properly
- Share best practices
- Get support from management
1. Work on cultural change
Changing the corporate culture must aim to distribute responsibility and ownership for software development on several shoulders. At least that is what Herve Coureil, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at Schneider Electric, advises. His company is pursuing a vision that affects the entire operating model. Agile methods should facilitate communication between portfolio management, finance, product management, product development, architecture, services and customers. To this end, Schneider Electric has established an “Agile Transformation Office” in 2019. The company also offers Scrum workshops and training.
2. Measure progress
Companies should measure the benefits of their Agile and DevOps initiatives, Coureil continues. To do so, they first need to develop metrics. His hint: start with the existing team roles and working methods. Understanding them reveals potential for improvement. A self-assessment template can help teams do this.
In addition, decision-makers must take new metrics into account. Jonathan Parnell, Senior Digital Transformation Architect at service provider Insight Enterprises, measures such metrics as technology advances, product pipeline trends, resource consumption, product quality, performance and business results. Insight Enterprises also monitors the process duration and the time it takes to resolve problems and the cost of troubleshooting.
3. Limit yourself to a few tools
“If too many tools are in use, each team gets used to its own procedures. This limits the culture of sharing,” says Coureil. At Schneider Electric, the DevOps architects pay attention to the tool stack. They ensure that the right tools are available for each new use case. Coureil speaks of a “permanent technology watch”.
4. Ensuring security and governance
In retrospect, Insight Enterprise Manager Parnell describes security not just as a possible “bottleneck”, but as a “barrier to speed and scalability”. His company did not sufficiently incorporate security at the beginning. The service provider has made up for this: software development now follows policies that include threat modeling, for example, as well as a “security-by-design” approach and security recommendations. Steve Bagby, CTO at Mastercard, also emphasizes the importance of governance: “Don’t fall for the mistake of understanding agile as ‘everybody does what they want’,” he says.
5. Train employees properly
“Train employees early and often”, recommends Coureil. Schneider Electric gathers the colleagues for a classroom training. Then scenarios are played through. The company supplements these measures with smaller coaching sessions in which certain learning contents are deepened. In addition, all learning content is available to employees in a portal. There, anyone can comment on and supplement the material.
6. Share best practices
The insurance company Liberty Mutual set up an Agile Enablement Office to support the developers. In addition, external specialists, including Scrum Master, are driving the transformation forward. Mark Cressey, Senior Vice President and General Manager Hosting Services, describes it as “key to success” when external specialists are called in. The exchange of knowledge and expertise is never linear. There are always interruptions to get feedback from the employees. They express themselves critically if something does not work.
7. Get support from management
“Everyone says they want to be agile or already are,” observes Mark Mathewson, CTO Small Business and International at financial services provider Capital One. But if a company wants to really implement this, it needs the support of top management. This also applies to budgeting and capacity planning. His company needed three years to migrate to the cloud, make DevOps scalable and introduce open source. Capital One is now beginning to benefit from the flexibility that has been created. The next goal is continuous delivery.
Here you can read the original article from Bob Violino on cio.de in german.