In SAFe Distilled 5.0: Achieving Business Agility With Scaled Agile Framework, authors Richard Knaster and Dean Leffingwell, describe DevOps, as “the adoption of a mindset, culture, and set of practices that provide solution elements to the customer without handoffs and without requiring excessive production or operations support.”
Erica Flora of Beyond 20 highlighted DevOps as a positive practice to implement in your workplace, where higher quality, shorter cycle times, quicker feedback loops, lower costs, lower levels of burnout, higher overall organisational performance and a culture of learning and continuous improvement being implemented.
The last of the above is certainly the most significant; being a learning organisation encourages individuals and teams to improve upon their pre-existing skills to work toward the common goal.
For further reading on the significance of being a learning organisation, you can read The Agile Works’ blog post: Learning To Be A Learning Organisation.
DevOps is regarded as an important area of agile practice due to its nature increasing output, and continuing to work alongside other practices to create efficient products and services that are fit for purpose.
Furthermore, the book explains that DevOps is grounded in five concepts: Culture, Automation, Lean flow, Measurement, and Recovery, often shortened to CALMR:
• Culture in this context refers to the philosophy of shared responsibility for fast value delivery across the entire value stream.
• Automation represents the need to remove as much human intervention from the pipeline as possible to decrease errors and reduce the cycle time of the release process.
• Lean flow identifies the practices of limiting WIP, reducing batch size, and managing queue lengths (SAFe Principle #6).
• Measurement fosters learning and continuous improvement by understanding and quantifying the flow of value through the pipeline.
• Recovery builds systems that allow fast fixes of production issues through automatic rollback and fix-forward (in production) capabilities.
By breaking down the barriers between development teams and operations teams, and involving people in both departments, allows those in both departments working with significantly less friction. By pushing bricks from the either side, and opening the space to communicate, many issues that may have once taken weeks or months to resolve between the departments, typos, missing decimal points, a lack of clarity etc. are suddenly much easier to resolve. By having a constant channel of communication between the departments, Andrew can go to Georgia’s office and ask her for a signature that she missed; just as Georgia can go to Andrew’s and simply ask for her to tell him what her spilt coffee smudged writing.
Based in London, U.K., and founded in 2016 by Arvind Mishra The Agile Works (www.TheAgileWorks.com), is an up-and-coming recruitment and Agile consulting company. Arvind is a Certified SAFe SPC and regularly delivers both private and public SAFe certification workshops.
He is a design thinking expert, Sr. enterprise, portfolio Agile Coach with over a decade of experience working as an Agile coach in diverse industries such as banking, pharma, retail, auto, oil, gas, consulting and government.
The Agile Works; a small team of three strive to help shape the leadership's mind-set and values in readiness for their business transformation journey challenges. With Arvind at the helm, we strive to provide you with the agility tools to make your company that can thrive, and not just survive.
To book a consultation, or for any enquiries, you can contact Arvind via the following email address: arvind@theagileworks.com
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