Your Journey From Agile Transformation Through DevOps To Digital Transformation

In the early days of Agile Transformations, the term often meant “implementing Scrum” in most companies. The goal was to leverage Scrum practices to improve a technology organization’s ability to deliver software more rapidly. With the Scrum framework’s emphasis on value delivery, ideally this software would better meet their customer’s needs. In many cases, people focused on doing Scrum and lost sight of the Agile Manifesto on which Scrum was based.

The goal was to “do agile” with the common desired outcome of faster to market. This approach served as a launching point for teams, and hopefully their leaders, to think and work in new ways. These ways when implemented well, led to many positive outcomes for the teams, the organization, and the customers. This was the first step into an Agile Transformation for most companies.

As teams began using Scrum, they discovered that in some situations Scrum wasn’t quite the right fit. This was especially true for technology teams that handled production support. They quickly realized how difficult it is to plan a Sprint’s worth of work, not to mention sticking to that plan, when their incoming work was unpredictable and often urgent. These teams branched out, learned from their Scrum experiments, and typically moved toward using Kanban.

Kanban is based on the manufacturing concepts of measuring how quickly items or work flow through your system, identifying and addressing bottlenecks so you can improve your process efficiency.

Creating a Kanban board, one of the key artifacts in Kanban, helped teams control their Work in Progress, see where their bottlenecks existed, so they could move the production incidents through their workflow more quickly.

This expansion beyond using Scrum was the second step into an Agile Transformation.

Over time, larger organizations recognized their need to scale Agile practices across multiple teams while keeping track of dependencies, inter-team communication, and overarching product and company priorities.

This was another step in their Agile Transformation and led to the rise of various scaling frameworks. Some companies chose the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), others chose Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), or one of various other Agile scaling frameworks.

The importance of the rise of Agile Scaling Frameworks was the recognition that Agile Transformations were expanding beyond software development teams, to impact more areas of their organization.

In these companies, Agility has a view across an entire portfolio or program of work. Scaling frameworks account for this by introducing various roles, artifacts, and meetings.

While this may seem like a linear progression, rarely is organizational change quite so neat and tidy.

As software development teams pushed forward with implementing Scrum or any other Agile framework, there was a growing tension between their desire to release software faster and the operations teams wanting to ensure all released code went through the right process steps.

This tension between the development and operations teams was one of the driving factors that led to the DevOps movement. The goal was to bring these two groups of people closer together through new tools, new processes, and new ways of thinking about automation.

Developers and Operations team members working closely together toward the same goals is the foundation of DevOps.

The problems solved and opportunities created with DevOps were a natural expansion of the early phases of an Agile Transformation within a company. New ways of thinking and working, with a focus on delivering customer value and an increased speed to market, were moving beyond the initial software development teams.

The problems solved and opportunities created with DevOps were a natural expansion of the early phases of an Agile Transformation within a company.

New ways of thinking and working, with a focus on delivering customer value and an increased speed to market, were moving beyond the initial software development teams.

Digital Transformations involve looking at all aspects of an organization and considering how the people, processes and tools can be improved. A Digital Transformation done well involves significant organizational change. One important focus within a Digital Transformation is on the company culture.

Some questions to consider include:

• Are there role and responsibility changes?
• Are manual processes being improved/replaced with automated processes?
• How are these changes impacting the individuals that are involved in the change?
• What are people’s fears, concerns, or questions around the organizational change happening?
• How well do people understand the need for and desired outcomes of these organizational changes?

While a Digital Transformation will very likely include an Agile Transformation and a move toward DevOps, that is not the full story of a Digital Transformation.

Digital Transformations cut across all areas within a company from human resources, to finance, to the technology groups and beyond.