There is a huge focus at the moment on AGILE and DEVOPS, and a large focus on bringing 1st, 2nd and 3rd Line teams into one – but quite often its not clear what the outcome is that people want to achieve.
Technology is a fast moving industry and the fear of not keeping up what is current is a huge problem that people face (sometimes the fear of not knowing the latest thing is just fear enough to cause the wrong decisions). Agile and DevOps arent that new, but it is only in the last two or three years that it has started to penetrate into the Enterprise arena.
What I see is people wanting to implement DevOps and Agile without having a clear idea of the value it brings. It needs to be assessed on the merits it will bring to the specifics of the problem it is expected to solve. Its an ROI, but not for the delivery of a project but for the delivery of a process.
A lot of assumptions are made around DevOps and Agile – that it will bring efficiency, that it will bring improved quality, that it will bring reduced costs, that it will bring better focused products for the user community. And granted, in some cases all can be achieved, but I take issue when something like DevOps or Agile is blindly implemented without a clear way of measuring success.
A lot of people are looking to collapsed the stack when it comes to IT operations. Reduce costs by removing the 1st Line, 2nd Line and 3rd Line concepts and bring it into one team – again, I can see in some cases that this is the right thing to do, but if efficiency of ticket throughput, or cost savings, or quality of service, or only one, or maybe all, or maybe something else are the drivers, then it is imperative to make sure that the performance indicaters are laid out before hand so that its is possible to see if you are being successful.
In my view its also, its worth picking one to begin with, one with the highest business value. For different organisations they will have different priorities – it might something like ticket throughput. My guide would be start just one at first, concentrate on getting it improved, measure your value being added as you go, complete it, measure that it is turned out as expected then move into the next most business valuable change.
A lot of companies are looking to collapse the stack, make use of the new methodologies and improve things. But it is very important that a clear understanding of how your want to see value brought as part of this change. Without this the collapse of the stack will occur in a very wild west fashion and you might end up worse than you were before.