As digital disruption continues to impact every industry in new and unexpected ways, modern organizations face a similar dilemma — how to nimbly respond to shifting customer needs, rising expectations, and competitive pressures.
Attempting to manage this complexity with a traditional waterfall approach, in which projects move along a linear and sequential path, incurs far too much risk. Cumbersome processes lead to long release cycles which slow the flow of customer features and results in loss of market share. Worse, delayed or missing feedback loops can lead to the development of features that fail to align with customer needs.
To address these challenges, modern businesses are shifting their approach. Gartner estimates as many as 85% of organizations now favor a product-centric delivery model, as promoted by both Agile and DevOps, as opposed to the traditional project-centric method.
Whether starting with Agile or DevOps, here are a few key factors to consider:
Start small and simple.
Plan to apply the principles of Agile to implement change in an iterative and incremental way, treating the adoption journey like a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This means empowering your teams to learn through iteration, adding complexity incrementally over time. Without this approach, you run the risk of re-creating something that operates and produces very similar results to existing systems without yielding much improvement in outcomes.
Not all challenges are created equal.
Throughout the process of transformation, organizations almost always discover multiple types of problems and opportunities for growth — simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. There are principles and practices that align to each type of challenge. The highest-performing organizations recognize the need to address all four types, and enable adaptive use of the best-suited principles and practices for each situation.
Look beyond leadership for solutions.
Many leaders attempt to define the solution to be implemented, which naturally creates resistance and significantly limits effectiveness. Greater success is found when leaders clearly define the problem and desired outcomes, along with boundaries and clear levels of decision delegation. The goal should be to create a space where those closest to the work are given the freedom to experiment and discover solutions.
Lead through culture.
Ongoing support and engagement from senior leadership is a key indicator of success in any transformation. As a leader within your organization, your role must be to drive and support the critical culture changes required to enable communication, collaboration, compassion and creativity. Throughout the transformation, you must consistently examine which elements of the current culture are impeding growth and identify steps to shift your words and actions to support behaviors that will better enable agility.
Don’t set it and forget it.
Anticipate that the first iteration of any solution will be imperfect and plan for ongoing improvements accordingly. Even those solutions which are well-suited to your existing needs or circumstances will need to be adapted over time to deal with new uncertainties and ongoing changes. This need for continuous optimization applies to software products, processes, tools and larger transformative efforts.
Avoid falling back into old habits.
Both organizational inertia and fundamental human nature make it easy for businesses to get comfortable with the way things are, for better or worse. Even once you’ve made the commitment to change, in the long run, if the cultural mindset doesn’t equally transform to embrace the new way of doing things, these changes are likely to fall away. To combat this issue, goals and successes should be consistently communicated and celebrated beyond immediate teams to the organization as a whole. Leverage ongoing performance metrics to ensure changes continue to demonstrate value — and reinforce these changes over time.
In the face of ongoing disruption, the ability to rapidly develop and deliver high-quality products is no longer a luxury but a necessity for future resilience. Agile and DevOps provide complementary approaches to streamline collaboration, improve feedback loops and deliver faster, more frequent releases.
While Agile helps to address uncertainty in the software development process, DevOps fully embraces this iterative and incremental approach, extending many of the same principles to the holistic product value stream. Together, they work hand in hand to help break down silos, enable faster feedback loops, shorten production cycles, and ultimately deliver greater value for customers and your business.
This article originally published in Insight’s quarterly e-magazine, Tech Journal.
