DevOps: An output of Continuous Improvement and demands Continuous Calibration

Whenever, we talk or practice any new methodology, process or may be philosophy, we often think as if something naïve is coming in, as if it will change the world and a new world will be created. Well, as humans and being blessed with the best race on the planet, we intend to change the world for better. IT is no different in that sense.

When I landed in IT more than a decade back, I knew that ‘Continuous Improvement’ is a necessity, and that eventually generates opportunities for both the customers and the service providers. And, this demand to have more and better everyday is changing the IT world every second. We often talk about changing, innovation, improvise but in true sense ‘Continuous Calibration’ is the need of today, and is gradually going to replace ‘Continuous Improvement’ jargons and initiatives. The question arises – Why and How? Improvement is something we perform, reach a next level, baseline it and then repeat the cycle. The Improvement cycle used to be 6 months to years, some 10 years back, and the gains were long term gains, where organizations had to first invest and then wait for the gains. This made the business restless, as the CXO level started looking for quick wins both quantitatively and qualitatively. This objective resulted into ‘Continuous Calibration’, where the demand is to improve every hour of the day, and baseline it everyday. Few years back, professionals were discussing on the possibility of leveraging Agile in Ops and fast-paced continuous improvements. And at the same time, DevOps was also being discussed and was gaining momentum. DevOps in a way had already started with Agile and Scrum practices being followed in the Dev world but was turning out to be a pain for the Ops community, as they now had more work to accomplish with tight timelines and no time to perform and stabilize, which resulted into a war called 'The Blame-Game'. DevOps became an answer and a tool to address this.

While addressing this instability between Dev & Ops, the industry realized that it is not only for the Application Development and Management, but can be effectively leveraged in the Infra space and expanding it to the Cloud world. Several tool companies jumped in with their products, which was too fast but not that robust, as Continuous Calibration demands for all round improvement and upgrades in parallel such that every element of DevOps are in sync. How this can be achieved, is a big question which is still haunting some of technology czars. To achieve this, one should use the LEAN APPROACH TO CONTINOUS CALIBRATION. Any such initiative should be divided into People, Process and Technology (which is nothing different from the past but demands better focused approach and thought implementation). Then you need to decompose them to make things simpler and leaner.

From the people perspective, all sort of resources, designers, developers, architects, testers, service management, delivery leads need to come together and should share the same vision rather than having siloed vision.

The processes should be lean and at the same time should be well integrated within each other supporting the technology framework / architecture. The lesser the number of workflows configured for the tasks to be performed, better is the output. Here the process consultants or the workflow designers have to put in their extra brains to make these workflow lean and global for any organization. When I say, Global – One workflow for all the regions. It has been seen, in almost all the industries, that workflow are mostly regional because of the stringent compliance parameters, that they need to adhere to, to ensure regulatory compliance, and avoid any non-conformities being raised during the audit.

Technology is another important piece, as this impacts, firstly, the scope and success of the project to a larger extent AND secondly, it has 2 working components – 1, the tools, that would be leveraged or exploited right from putting demand in place, to project planning, to requirement gathering, to the final implementation, and 2, the technologies that would be catered to as part of the workflow.

How best we can fit all these components and how realistic are the plans along with the capability of the tools decides the success of the project. And at last, one should always remain confined to agreed and Signed Off scope of the project. Scope creep should be proper NO – NO, unless it is a regulatory thing, that cannot be avoided.

Thanks for taking time out to read this. I hope you enjoyed it, and has given you a glimpse to push your nerves to think, where and why things go wrong and How they can be made better.