Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
When implemented properly, DevOps can transform your software engineering process and create value for both employees and customers, producing business performance and value.
A fully working DevOps methodology will bring the following benefits:
- Increased service quality
Perceived service quality and reliability depend on both the availability of a service in the absence of error (MTTF: Mean-Time-To-Failure) and the ability to restore the service to an error-free-state (MTTR: Mean-Time-To-Repair).
Due to fast feedback loops and high release velocity, service deficiencies are removed much faster than in the past (shortened MTTR), which leads to an improvement of perceived service quality and reliability.
- Increased reliability of service delivery
The perceived timeliness of delivery is an extremely important satisfaction factor for your internal or external customers Usable results are delivered early and frequently, which is critical in uncertain and changing business environments.
With agile and DevOps, big projects are cut into small chunks, which are then continuously delivered. Both initial and successive requirements and changes are delivered with short lead times, while changes are possible at any time in the process.
- Increased customer value through responsiveness to change
To stay relevant, businesses need to constantly adopt to a rapidly changing market environment, respond to competitors and stay ahead in the innovation cycle. Your business needs to act in a world of uncertainty.
This means that at the time a new idea is brought up, most of the project details cannot be known. Even once they are defined later on, they are subject to constant change. Complex upfront specifications – a necessary deliverable in the absence of short release cycles – often become obsolete.
- Better usability increases customer satisfaction
Shorter release cycles lead to shorter feedback cycles. Your customers are receiving frequent and timely updates, which gives you the ability to evaluate and test their satisfaction and response early on.
You can even test different versions of your product at the same time with different customer groups by A/B testing. This gives you the ability to compare different new features or capabilities of your products to each other.
- Efficient operations
Agile and DevOps are built on lean principles. The reduction of waste, such as unnecessary waiting times or process overhead through continuous improvement, is a core principle.
This not only helps agility, but also has a positive impact on costs by helps to limit their growth.
- Reduce bottlenecks through cross-pollination of skills
Blurring the line between dev and ops involves each side learning about the other’s trade. This enables staff to understand the whole process end-to-end and see where it can be tweaked and improved.
If ops know the basics of coding and vice-versa, bottlenecks can be removed by not having to rely on highly specialized individuals. Automation also helps here, for instance in the way a dev can use a service catalogue within ServiceNow to spin up environments on demand, without waiting for an ops member to have free time.
- Holistic value creation increases employee satisfaction
In a conventional IT organization, both dev and ops are often limited to executing specialized tasks. The value these tasks create for customers is often difficult for customers to measure, as it is one small aspect of a complex process.
Whether internal or external customers are served, the impact created by agile dev and ops teams is far more direct and holistic and can thus be more easily observed and “felt” by employees.
- Collaboration improves employee attitude
Whereas previously dev would hand code over to ops then switch to the next project, DevOps encourages collaboration throughout the team along the entire process. Not just exchanging emails, but face-to-face and through collaborative devices such as Kanban boards and Scrum meetings.
In the past, the two teams could have been working in different offices. DevOps brings IT together, and this shift in culture is likely to spread outside the department. This reduces waste through misaligned incentives causing political behaviour and mutual blame and increases employee satisfaction.
- Constant learning and improvement
DevOps promotes a culture of continuous learning and improvement through lean principles. In a fast-moving and unpredictable environment, continuous improvement is the single most important source of sustained competitive advantage and superior economic value.
An continuous learning environment also attracts and sustains outstanding talent. It is an important ingredient to employee satisfaction.
- Reinvigorate your employees
Apart from the new technical practices DevOps brings, perhaps one of the main advantages for IT is the shake-up it gives working lives. Like a new sports coach can bring a fresh perspective and increased work-rate amongst the team, so DevOps can reinvigorate software engineering teams.
New people to interact with, perhaps even a new office and a new way of working – DevOps can be just what IT needs to breathe life into stagnating staff who have been following the same routine for far too long.
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In order find out how to implement DevOps in your IT department and see these benefits for yourself, I recommend attending my free webinar on Tuesday 28th July. Click to find out more.
