No person would purposely handcuff himself or herself to avoid doing work; no company would halt production to avoid making a profit. When it comes to DevOps, operations is often holding the value stream hostage as in the above situations.
In today’s world, we expect everything to be on-demand. We want instantaneous services and benefits, and for companies to know that they cannot keep their customers waiting. Just as customers demand real-time service and efficiency when interacting with a company, the IT people working for an enterprise require a similar speediness in order to keep a company in business. The problem they face is that from development to operations, everything is not always available when it’s needed.
Roadblocks to IT
There are often large roadblocks when it comes to DevOps, making production slow, inefficient, and ineffective. There are many different people and groups in an organization constraining IT departments, and to make matter worse, everyone thinks they have a legitimate reason for doing so. Idea people want to control changes in their environment; developers want to push out finished products so they do not have time to be constrained or held up by internal politics, budget issues, or whatever other problems a company might face.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems for DevOps is pinpointing the constraint. The factor that’s really slowing things down is operations. Development teams need test environments when they need them, not days or weeks later. If they cannot have what is necessary on-demand, they end up testing environments for a given project that are years old. This is completely contradictory to their function to test environments as they are finished, to have a quick turnaround to identify problems and solve them.
Detour Ahead
Companies can’t beat around the bush when it comes to these IT problems. Anything not fixed at the constraint is often seen as a mere cursory solution that could end up causing more problems than it solves. If an organization opts to fix something before the constraint, it could create more work for them that exists before the actual constraint. If a company tries to fix something after the constraint, it could leave them strained for work. Companies need to identify the actual problem, zero in on that, and fix it.
The capability to create environments when you need it and have them available how you need it, can help improve performance. Operations teams are often creating development environments that look similar enough to mimic the development process to create faster flows and fix problems before they would actually happen. This makes the blame game much easier in identifying if a problem is a code failure or an environmental failure. In order for an organization to become flexible, agile and competitive, it must alter the current approach to operations.
For more information, you can check out our On-Demand content featuring the Google+ Hangout titled, “Private PaaS: Accelerating Continuous Delivery for DevOps.”
