Sometimes known as the Stone Dragon, the Great Wall of China is one of the world’s greatest engineering wonders. This masterpiece can be seen from space and was built as a series of fortifications over several hundred years and across the historical northern borders of Imperial China. It served as protection against various dynasties, delineating borders while separating cultures, norms and lifestyles.
Apart from defense, the Great Wall served other purposes, including:
- Border control and the control and regulation of trade and transportation of goods along the Silk Road.
- A signaling system; communication towers 11 miles apart were created to send transmitted messages by smoke during the day and fire at night, which enabled alarms to be sent across the wall within 24 hours.
Through the decades, the IT industry has also built its own Great Wall that separates its two ruling dynasties: development and operations (figure 1). IT literature refers to this metaphoric wall as the Wall of Confusion,1 which separates both teams and causes a massive divergence in their objectives and cultures. The development team focuses on agility and speed of delivery, while the operations team’s main focus is on stability, maturity and compliance. This separation leads to a culture of silos, self-protection and tribalism impacting both teams and the value that IT delivers to consumers.
Similar to the Great Wall of China, the IT wall has also served other purposes, including:
- Border control—The wall controls releases, deployments and handovers where developers then send their finished products over the wall to the operations team.
- Signaling systems—The operations team sends alerts and unsolved incidents or issues back to the development team.
Due to its devastating impact on value delivery, IT professionals have made efforts to break down this wall. DevOps emerged as a practice that aims to reunite development and operations into a unified tribe. In addition, IT best practices such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and COBIT® launched modern frameworks for the same purpose: bridging gaps between both teams and improving value delivery to be faster, cheaper and better overall.
A Three-Way approach was introduced in The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, And Helping Your Business Win. 2 It defines bidirectional practices and interactions that are consistently found in high-performing organizations and can be used to support IT enterprises in achieving g higher levels of collaboration between development and operations teams.
The First Way: Improving the Flow
How can the flow of work and goods be optimized downstream from development to operations? The first step toward answering this question is defining the value stream, which is a series of steps an organization undertakes to create and deliver products and services to consumers (figure 2).3 Once defined and visualized, bottlenecks and constraints within the value stream can be eliminated. Some of the possible techniques to understand and optimize workflows include:
- Continuous deployment—Continuous deployment is an extension of the DevOps concept of continuous delivery. In continuous deployment, all changes that pass automated tests are automatically pushed into production or production-like environments, reducing handoffs. According to the 2016 State of DevOps Report, high-performing IT organizations achieved more than 1,400 deployments in 2016 through streamlining and automating deployments while reducing the cost of handover in terms of time, effort and downtime.4
- Working in small batches—The days of one large, monthly release are gone. Agile frameworks promote the idea of splitting work into smaller, more manageable increments, which increases the flow of service delivery on features rather than on a per-module basis. For example, in Scrum frameworks, the iteration or sprint, within which features are delivered, can be from one to four weeks. This increases the frequency of interactions and collaboration between development and operations teams.
- Involving operations in development value streams—Involving operations teams early in any change increases transparency, establishes trust and improves overall change quality by incorporating inputs and insights from garrisons down the wall who will eventually be responsible for operating this change. This quality-first approach incorporates operational or nonfunctional requirements into products even before adding functionalities, as opposed to the traditional development model, where nonfunctional requirements are considered or inspected late in the development life cycle after all functional requirements are completed.5
The Second Way: Improving Feedback
The second way focuses on amplifying feedback from upstream operations to development (figure 3). It describes the principles that enable the reciprocal, fast and constant feedback to improve communication and collaboration.
- Strengthening and automating feedback loops—What if more lighting beacons were installed across the wall? What if smoke or fire signals were instantly transmitted instead of waiting for 24 hours? Modern practices such as DevOps, Scrum and Visual Management offer opportunities to provide fast feedback, ensuring that problems are detected as they occur—not late in the workflow— with capabilities to automate raising incidents or change requests to concerned teams.
- Involving development teams in operations value streams—Incident and problem management processes are long-lived operational specialties handled by the traditional multitiered support model, where work items are escalated through levels based on the experience of personnel and service level targets until resolution is achieved. Swarming is a technique where people from different levels or backgrounds can work on items simultaneously to avoid delays caused by the classical hierarchal models. Involving developers in both incident and problem management processes (operational value steams) is becoming a norm and a vital enabler for new ways of working, such as DevOps.6
- Voice of operations—Voice of the customer (VoC) is a lean management practice that encourages feedback by connecting value directly to customers and asking questions to ensure that customer value is understood. Applying this practice by listening to operations teams and incorporating their inputs, feedback and concerns into value streams improves trust between both teams and improves the overall value that is being delivered. Surveys, questionnaires and service alignment meetings are among the widely adopted approaches for collecting voice of operations.
The Third Way: Continual Experimentation
The third way focuses on the creation of a culture of continual experimentation and learning, enabling ongoing knowledge creation and sharing for individuals, teams and the organization (figure 4). Living in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world requires breaking down silo culture, often associated with fear and low trust, and helping IT teams to embrace failure as a learning tool and see the value in innovation. Some of the techniques that can be used to establish and foster such culture include:
- Transformational leadership—The most important step toward cultivating a culture of experimentation is a shift in leadership’s mindset and style from the traditional command and control approach to transformational leadership. These new leaders, sometimes referred to as servants, work toward a vision; demonstrate patience; lead with questions, thus stimulating teams intellectually; develop individuals; and enable effective teamwork by being present and involved.
- Enabling a safe culture for learning—It is not uncommon for IT individuals to feel as if they will be penalized for pointing out problems, rejected if they make suggestions or blamed if something fails. This blaming culture has been one of the biggest impediments in IT organizations for decades. A safe culture for learning sees failure as an opportunity to gain knowledge and does not focus on blaming or punishing when problems occur. In such a culture, messengers who point out problems are trained, failure causes inquiry, and novelty or suggestions are implemented. Netflix introduced its Simian Army as a suite of failure-inducing tools aimed at bolstering a system’s failure resilience by inducing different types of failure.7 This allowed the organization to see how teams and monitoring tools would react in different situations, leading to an overall improvement in resilience.
- Institutionalizing continual improvement—Successful organizations communicate the value of continuous improvement and integrate it into every aspect of the business by institutionalizing a process to identify, plan, execute and evaluate improvement initiatives. Continual improvement cycles such as the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA), ITIL and COBIT continual improvement models, and the Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) are examples of such processes that can be used in IT organizations to formalize a structured approach toward continuously improving products, services and practices.
- Innovation labs—Also known as innovation centers or hubs, innovation labs are becoming vital components for leading organizations that want to remain relevant in the face of disruption. The idea of having small cross-functional and creative teams that focus on establishing new business models, creating new services, or exploring new technologies or trends enables both development and operations teams to exchange ideas and practice new things in a creative atmosphere.
- IT competitions—Many IT organizations hold periodic competitions, such as datathons or hackathons, giving development and operations teams and individuals opportunities to form cross-functional teams. The intent is to improve collaboration between people with different backgrounds, skills and competencies. Such competitions can cultivate a culture of sharing knowledge and experience while enabling individuals to explore and understand different mindsets that exist in the organization.
The Three-Way approach is a flexible and cost-effective model that can be applied in organizations to break down the Wall of Confusion and improve overall collaboration.
Conclusion
The Three-Way approach is a flexible and cost-effective model that can be applied in organizations to break down the Wall of Confusion and improve overall collaboration and communications between development and operations teams. Throughout history, from ancient Roman walls to the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall in modern history, humanity looks back at the remains of those self-protecting and defensive walls as part of cultural heritage. For decades, the Wall of Confusion divided IT organizations into silos, impacting value delivery, collaboration and cultures, but now IT professionals are moving forward by leveraging the improvements gained from applying the Three Ways approach.
Endnotes
1 APMG and DevOps Agile Skills, DASA DevOps Fundamentals, http://www.itpreneurs.com/product/dasa-devops-fundamentals-self-study-with-exam-apmg
2 Kim, G.; K. Behr; G. Spafford; The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, IT Revolution Press, USA, 2013
3 AXELOS, ITIL Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, The Stationery Office (TSO), United Kingdom, 2020
4 Brown, A.; N. Forsgren; J. Humble; N. Kersten; G. Kim; 2016 State of DevOps Report, Puppet, Inc. and DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), 2016, p. 48
5 Meyer, B.; “Practice to Perfect: The Quality First Model,” Computer, May 1997, http://se.inf.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/computer/quality_first.pdf, p. 102–106
6 Op cit AXELOS
7 Izrailevsky, Y.; A. Tseitlin; “The Netflix Simian Army,” Netflix Technology Blog, 19 July 2011, http://netflixtechblog.com/the-netflix-simian-army-16e57fbab116
Abdelelah Alzaghloul, CISA, CRISC, CISM,CGEIT, ITIL 4 MP
Is an IT advisor with 17 years of experience in IT governance, service delivery and IT transformation programs. He is experienced in the deployment of various IT governance frameworks and standards in the telecommunications sector. He is also a certified trainer in the IT governance and service management fields.