A Roller Coaster Ride for transforming Operations Teams!!

A typical product team comprises of Dev and an Ops team. The Dev teams focus on quicker releases, new product features while the Ops team focus on ensuring that their infrastructure stays up and running all the time. This world was good for a while until customers started expecting more and the competition grew. Organizations are taking a stand on how to beat the competition and stay relevant. To implement such a thought, definitely demands an organization change.

Are you experiencing transformation or are heading towards it? As an Ops expert you or your teams perform activities/tasks through the tickets that are assigned. Every ticket has a life cycle and is tracked end to end, but it stays as a different entity as compared to the Dev community. The new change demands you and your teams to adopt new ways of working like pulling work rather than pushing work, participating in architectural meetings, understanding application behavior/nature that are deployed and maintained by you/your team rather than tracking infrastructure. This does not mean that you need to write code, instead it expects you to understand the business, in other words it is enabling you to work as “One Team” along with the Dev teams. It actually empowers you about the product that your organization owns. Every organization today is heading on a transformation journey and is asking their teams to quickly adapt to the change. Typically such a journey is planned for 12-18 months. If you too are experiencing such a change, then you are all set for a roller coaster ride – a ride worth to experience.

If you have been to a roller coaster ride, you must have experienced the initial thrills, being suspenseful but determined to take the ride. You are anxious about your ride but are willing to experience the path. The ride starts slowly, you feel the climb as you go higher and higher, the ride reaches an acme/curve of the structure and then the gravity pulls you down. Every person riding the coaster either screams or shouts. The ride continues to another acme and finally comes to an end. Although the ride is for a short duration but the “experience” is what matters. You got a chance, you participated, you learnt the path of the coaster – the ups and downs and finally you now have an experience to count, an experience which you can share with others.

Similar to a roller coaster ride, is a transformation journey that your organization is planning. Initially there will be a lot of anxiousness about whats happening in the organization- various thoughts will surround you like ….are we being laid off, will the new methods ruin our comfort level, is it mandatory to be agile, can Ops function properly in this manner? The first thing to do is accept the “new change“, understand the “reason” behind this change and get “involved/participate” in the journey. This is a chance to learn and grow your expertise.

So what, if you are an Ops expert, you too can be “Agile“. Agile is not something that is linked and meant for Dev teams only. Once you adopt agile principles, you can step forward on the “DevOps” journey too. It is all about “effective ways of working” – delivering value, continuously learning and improving the culture spectrum. Take a look at how things differ in the new world..

Willing to take the ride? 🙂 Do share in your experiences!!