DevOps bridging the silos in IT

  • April 24, 2018
DevOps bridging the silos in IT
 

As an IT Leader, one of my challenges with Project Managers was to constantly remind them that they had no right to authorise Take-On of any system or significant changes. Whilst one of their drivers has always been meeting plans and stake-holder timeline expectations, to those who support and administer that platform operationally, it often feels like their key objective is to chuck a project over the wall into support and then run away. Going-live in an unprepared state never helps any IT Department, all it serves to do is put it firmly in the cross-hairs of our business colleagues for uncontrolled events and failures that cannot be recovered gracefully. Getting into this situation is often the result of a siloed approach to IT Teams.

Whilst our profession has more than its fair share of method evangelists, in fact a whole industry constantly rotates around the latest and greatest, one methodology that has shown great success in facilitating a more joined up approach is DevOps. Put simply, this is the integration into project delivery of the operational run teams. Whilst this is an oversimplification, it is centric to the integration of the traditional Run and Change responsibilities into one joined up unit. Run is no longer something that is forgotten in a Project Manager’s rush to meet their promised deadlines and no longer can the Ops side of IT delay go-live because what they are being asked to do has arrived far too late in the day.

The evolution of IT away from siloed specialisms run with their own objectives and resource challenges, shows that alignment with business priorities and system performance have become a priority to IT leaders across the industry. No longer should a bumpy bedding-in period be tolerated. 

Long live DevOps…for now.