What is your strategy for unplanned work that comes up in a project or in general? Do you have one? Let’s face it, at every organization and in every industry, unanticipated projects will happen. So, how can DevOps help you with it?
The driving force behind DevOps is being able to develop, test and roll out the software at a higher frequency and with more reliable results. That goal alone will help you deal with unplanned work, but how else can it help?
The heart of DevOps is a change in culture and philosophy. It bridges a gap between development and operations that puts them on the same team. End users and programmers are now working together, building trust and integrating their departments. This kind of teamwork promotes quick resolution of critical issues, a higher rate of innovation, and the ability to rapidly respond to unplanned work and complications.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of a DevOps environment.
Many companies suffer from silos. Individual departments often do their own job well enough but do not cooperate with other teams in the company. This leads to subpar final products. Culture is the first success of DevOps. The collaborative atmosphere creates a shared responsibility for the accuracy and results of the final product. The process of creating becomes transparent and the ability to give and act on feedback rapidly adds trust and reliability.
DevOps helps you break free of siloes. Promoting team members to consider how their work affects not just themselves and their team but each team and affected user throughout the life of the project. It eliminates the mentality of blame and fear of responsibility. Everyone becomes responsible for a release that is beneficial as expected. Workers have a sincere aspiration to work together to create a solution.
Time is one of your most precious resources. DevOps has the ability to create faster releases with increased quality. With the culture of collaboration mentioned above you will create better automation and more uniform tools and procedures. Operations will trust the work of developers and will not hesitate to go to them with any kinks found in the process, allowing quick and painless resolution.
With the minimization of repetitive work operations and reliable outcomes workers are able to think about innovation and become inspired to suggest and work for even more improved procedures. Once you employ continuous delivery for your software rollouts it frees up even more time and provides more reliable outcomes.
With the quick feedback coming from your improved communications and the benefits of automation your team will be able to respond to issues quickly and minimize any related downtime. As this is one of the main instigators of frustration between team members these smooth rollouts will do even more to help improve your team culture. They will come together to rapidly fix any issues and rollout out the resolutions as fast as possible.
Also, your automated processes and open communication will contribute to fewer issues overall. Plus, with your team accepting responsibility as a whole you will skip right over the time-consuming “whose fault is this” part of a problem and straight to finding a solution.
Together, all of these things contribute to a decreased amount of and better management of unplanned work. You have consistent and reliable automated processes and a team not held back from a lack of communication and trust. Unplanned work can easily filter through the regular process without much impact.
These are just a few of the ways DevOps helps you deal with unplanned work. Follow the link to learn more about transitioning to DevOps with Aspirant.