If a client hasn’t considered DevOps consulting as part of their Agile Consulting needs, why should they?

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3 minute read

Why Agile Alone Isn’t Enough Without DevOps Consulting 

When you think of Agile, you might envision a fast-paced environment where features are delivered in a swift, iterative manner.  

However, there’s a silent partner that’s crucial to the success of any Agile framework: DevOps. Without it, the Agile process can be like a sports car without an engine - it looks impressive, but it won’t get you far. Here’s why DevOps consulting is a must-have in your Agile arsenal. 

Agile Meets DevOps: A Match Made in Software Heaven 😇👩‍💻🤝🔧 

Agile methodologies have revolutionized how we approach project management, offering flexibility and adaptability in ever-changing environments. But without the merging of development and operations - the heart of DevOps - the full potential of Agile remains untapped.  

Imagine having a team that not only adapts quickly but also delivers with precision and quality. That’s the promise of Agile and DevOps together. 

  • Unite the Silos: By integrating DevOps, you encourage developers and operations teams to work together, preventing the dreaded silo effect. Collaboration has become the new norm. 

  • Accelerate Time to Market: Embrace the rapid deployment that DevOps offers, pushing your product into the customers’ hands faster, with efficiency that Agile alone can’t match. 

  • Quality Assurance: With DevOps, “shift left” becomes part of your mantra, placing an emphasis on security and quality from the get-go. 

The Role of DevOps Consulting in Agile Environments 🌟📈 

Incorporating DevOps principles into your Agile practice isn’t just a checkbox on a to-do list. It’s about ensuring that your teams’ capabilities in delivery and quality are enhanced by expert guidance and tailored strategies. 

  • Engineering Excellence: A DevOps consultant brings in a fresh perspective focused on continuous improvement and technical excellence, paving the way for better practices and a culture of quality. 

  • Harmonise Practices: Find the sweet spot where Agile methodologies and DevOps strategies coexist to create a balanced and efficient pipeline, ensuring that your process is lean and mean. 

DevOps: More Than Just Tools, It’s a Culture Shift 🔄💡🛠️ 

Adopting DevOps is not just about picking the right set of tools; it’s about instilling a culture that seamlessly integrates development with operations, making sure that the technical side of your business evolves as quickly as your Agile methodologies. 

  • Feedback Loops: Reduce the feedback time between writing code and seeing it in action. This rapid iteration leads to a product that’s not only built faster but built better. 

  • From Deployment to Development: With a DevOps mindset, every code is crafted with production in mind, leading to smoother deployments and a more resilient end product. 

Why DevOps Cannot Be an Afterthought 🎯🚀 

DevOps should never be an afterthought in the Agile process; it’s a foundational element that guarantees your Agile practices are not just theoretically effective but also practically successful. 

  • Harmony in Progression: Balancing the development pace with your ability to adapt organizationally is key to not just surviving but thriving in today’s market. 

  • Unlock Potential: Leverage DevOps to tap into the latent potential of your Agile teams, ensuring that the efficiency promised is the efficiency delivered. 

By weaving DevOps consulting into the fabric of your Agile methodologies, you’re not just embracing a trend; you’re adopting a comprehensive approach that guarantees your software development process is robust, responsive, and relentlessly forward-moving. 🚀 

It’s an investment in not just maintaining pace with the industry but setting the pace. The message is clear: Agile and DevOps are better together, and your software delivery will thank you for it. 💡🎉

If a client, so if you’re doing Agile, why should you incorporate DevOps? I think the core answer is that you can’t really, if you’re building software products—I’ll caveat that—if you’re building software products, you can’t do one and not the other. DevOps is really synonymous with this idea of engineering excellence, right? Of shortening the feedback loop, making high-quality code, shifting left, and those things are part of that DevOps story.

They need to go up in kind of logger step with your Agile practices. And if you’re doing something else, let’s say you’re doing marketing, right? You’re delivering marketing output, then your Agile practices will increase, but you need to increase your capability of your teams to deliver marketing content, right? That would be that technical site in the software world—it’s DevOps, right?

Building up that expertise, if you’re amazing at delivering products to production really quickly, of delivering high-quality products to production really quickly, but you haven’t figured out how to adapt your organisation so that you respond more quickly to the market, then you’re still not going to get the value from the DevOps, right?

So trying to figure out how you maintain, keep increasing your levels of technical capability of engineering excellence, right, on one side, at the same pace as you’re increasing your ability for your organisation to respond to the market, right? Whatever market you’re in is really important. You have to balance that out.

I mean, one can get further ahead than the other, but you really do need them to go in step. So once you start bringing in those engineering excellence or DevOps practices, you’re able to allow your engineers to really focus on how they shorten those feedback loops—not just the business feedback loops, but the actual engineering feedback loops—and build products that they can get into production as quickly as possible so you can validate all of the assumptions that you made when you were designing it.

Thanks for watching the video! If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.

Market Adaptability Software Development Technical Mastery Software Developers Pragmatic Thinking Product Delivery Value Delivery Technical Excellence Engineering Practices Working Software

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