We’re not contracted to do that…

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Not so long ago we had systems integrators and a few of them truly took on the overall ownership of a project and everything that goes with it.

Those were golden days for some but things change.

More often than not we hear of outsourcers or internal teams spending as much time negotiating who is responsible for what after the contract has been signed.

I am delighted to find myself at the centre of movement called DevOps that I
think has the potential to eradicate this problem.

Organisations that fail to adopt to the DevOps model will eventually lose to competitors who have changed and new entrants that enter the market.

DevOps enables an organisation to do three things that have the potential to change the ‘not contracted’ road-block.

1. By adopting Agile projects become smaller and while the deliverable has fewer unknowns (it changes based on business owner feedback). The scope is smaller and more manageable. From a technical standpoint there are fewer grey areas; the sprint/scrum or however you organise yourselves owns the deliverable, full-stop.
2. Each project now must be composed of the ‘right’ people to do the job. A good team will have all of the necessary skills represented, talking and self-organising at every stand-up. The hand-off and latency has been
   dramatically reduced.
3. Everyone has a relationship; a product is not delivered until the sprint is complete. In the unlikely event that 1 & 2 above fail at least the leaders in the organisation will only find themselves having to manage and unravel a few weeks of elapsed work so recovery becomes a reality.

To be brutally honest, I have seen one DevOps organisation fall into the “not contracted to do that” trap but my analysis of their situation is that they were DevOps in name but not in culture.

It was all about an operations team trying to be topical but without actually changing the nature of the IT business…