Article The Unified Value of Agile and DevOps

As digital disruption continues to impact every industry in new and unexpected ways, modern organisations face a similar dilemma — how to nimbly respond to shifting customer needs, rising expectations and competitive pressures.

Today, a business's growth, and indeed survival, depends on its ability to quickly identify and deliver valuable products to customers. This means managing the combined and often conflicting demands for rapid change amidst vague constraints and complex interdependencies.

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 organisations now favor a product-centric delivery model, as promoted by both Agile and DevOps, as opposed to the traditional project-centric method.

But the correlation and, in some cases, intersection of Agile and DevOps can create some confusion. Are they complementary or competing? What are the differences? Where does each live within your organisation? And which should you adopt first?

The Agile approach

Agile, in its simplest form, provides a set of guidelines for helping teams maintain focus on the evolving needs of the customer throughout the development cycle. By iteratively refining functionality, soliciting feedback and enhancing working increments over time, Agile empowers organisations to build on progressive learnings — and work toward delivering a product that encompasses the end-to-end user journey.

There are many approaches, from Scrum and Kanban to Lean Software Development, which can be applied to Agile, but it's critical to recognise that simply adopting these practices in a templatised manner won't help your organisation achieve its transformation goals. Likewise, limiting the adoption of Agile to development teams — or attempting to implement this approach without shifting the underlying culture — will inevitably lead to poor results and missed opportunities.

But even those that have effectively transformed with Agile often notice opportunities for further optimisation throughout the development process. Teams may be able to rapidly develop and deliver applications, but the approach often reveals corresponding challenges with technical support, security and automation. While Agile is effective at highlighting these issues, it isn't intended to provide solutions — it doesn't include specific tactics for execution or measurement. Instead it assumes organisations will need to adopt other practices and methodologies in tandem.

This is why, according to the 14th Annual State of Agile Report, 90% of organisations that have implemented Agile feel DevOps transformation is important to their goals, with 76% reporting that they're currently undergoing or planning a DevOps initiative in the next year.

DevOps transformation

Sometimes referred to as Agile applied beyond the software team, DevOps evolved from the recognition that many of the same principles established to improve the software development process could also be applied to the entire product value stream. The goal of DevOps is to streamline and manage engineering processes from end-to-end, enabling IT teams to accelerate time to market with high quality and reliability.

Because DevOps encompasses the value stream holistically, it involves a wide range of skills across software development and IT operations, including everyone involved in taking a feature from a mere idea to production deployment. By unifying people, processes, technology and culture to create multidisciplinary teams, DevOps helps organisations improve communication and collaboration, reduce time-consuming handoffs between siloes, and enable greater focus on constant testing and delivery.

To accomplish these goals DevOps not only embraces many Lean and Agile principles, but also provides many of the complementary practices needed to resolve technical and process challenges related to rapid delivery. Bringing together all teams within the value stream with an emphasis on collaboration, automation and testing allows organisations to better support the fast, frequent, high-quality releases which Agile strives for.

The underlying values and cultural shifts associated with both Agile and DevOps offer a new way of thinking about, and addressing the challenges of, uncertainty and ongoing change. When applied in tandem, these approaches yield greater visibility and alignment, faster time to market, higher quality and ultimately greater value for the business.

Better together

According to research by Freeform Dynamics, those that effectively leverage Agile and DevOps together — not just among specific teams but also throughout their organisations — report up to 60% higher revenue and profit growth than their non-Agile and -DevOps counterparts. They're also more than twice as likely to grow their business at a rate of more than 20%.

This is because Agile and DevOps empower teams to maintain focus on their next-best product investment. They provide a framework for optimising organisational structures, processes and tools to enable sustainable flow of value. These approaches also help to remove or integrate silos to support common goals, creating greater clarity in decision-making responsibilities and involvement in key domains.

Teams that successfully adopt both Agile and DevOps are able to deploy features to production faster, more frequently, with higher quality and less effort, and at a significantly lower cost.

Tips for implementation

Of the 1,279 IT leaders surveyed by Freeform Dynamics, just 18% had broadly implemented Agile and DevOps across their organisations. This indicates that while modern business leaders understand the need for DevOps and Agile adoption, the majority are missing out on the full benefits.

Those considering implementing DevOps and Agile together should begin with whichever approach addresses the most immediate business need. In many cases, building capabilities with one approach will lead to the other.

Discover the Agile and DevOps sweet spot. Our experts share strategies for harnessing the combined power of these approaches across your organisation.

About the authors:

Vince Fabro

National Principal Architect, Insight

Vince is a Principal Architect for Insight Digital Innovation’s National Team and has been an IT consultant for more than 26 years. He helps IT organisations across the U.S. improve their ability to deliver customer value via his expertise in DevOps, cloud enablement and application modernisation. He loves building and fixing things and working with teams to achieve success.

Ken Rickard

National Agile Coach, Insight

Ken draws from his 21+ years of working with business units in various roles to guide people towards delivering valuable outcomes. His past 10 years have been spent learning as a Scrum Developer, Scrum Master, Kanban coach, Agile Coach and Lean Change agent.

Ken travels the country leading people, teams and organisations in their improvement journeys. He has worked in the public sector, higher education, finance, entertainment, retail, manufacturing, beverage, CPG and healthcare industries. He specialises in working with organisational leaders who seek to shift their leadership skills from directing to empowering, and with teams who want to enable their creativity and innovation.

Mark Wavle

National Lead, Agile Enablement Services, Insight

Mark is an experienced Agile practitioner, coach and Professional Scrum Trainer for Insight’s Digital Innovation team. He has more than 12 years of Agile experience as a team member, Scrum Master and Agile coach and has worked in a variety of industries, including healthcare, marketing, insurance and retail. He leads Insight's National Agile Team in continuing to grow Agile delivery across the United States.