How to Make Your Business Embrace Agile and DevOps

Agile and DevOps have turned out to be one of the most rewarding undertakings for many businesses. 

Enterprises that have successfully integrated Agile and DevOps cultures into their operations have been reaping big from their investment.

Enhanced team collaboration and trust, quick-time-to-market, better profitability, lower development costs, high-quality software, efficiency, and innovation are among the many benefits of adopting Agile and DevOps.

But before such benefits, there are several things that your business must consider before embracing Agile and DevOps. This is because becoming a strong Agile and DevOps adopter is no easy task. 

The rewards are enormous, but the path to embracing meaningful Agile and DevOps is challenging. Our team works with companies implementing these cutting-edge strategies every day, and we’d be happy to have a conversation with you.

Here's how you can make your business smoothly embrace Agile and DevOps and reap all the benefits they have to offer.

Understand Agile and DevOps Work

Let's start at the beginning: everyone needs to understand how Agile and DevOps work. 

After all, how can Agile and DevOps strategies help your business if you and your team don't know how they function.

Ensure everyone from the top-down is intimately familiar with Agile and DevOps processes, how they work and what they can deliver. This helps set realistic goals and expectations once your business starts to adopt Agile and DevOps.

Remember that Agile and DevOps aren't silver bullets that will get rid of all your business problems. No, they're just a piece of the puzzle – but a major piece.

Both require consistent, continuous process improvement before your business realizes the full benefits. The last thing you want is conflicts and false concepts brought about by misinformation on what Agile and DevOps can do for your business.

Understand Agile and DevOps Hurdles

Although Agile and DevOps bring many benefits, their disruptive nature means your team will inevitably face challenges along the way. 

To succeed, leaders and their teams must understand and address the challenges as they come. For years, the organizations that thrived leveraging Agile and DevOps processes have understood and learned how to navigate accompanying complexities and hurdles. They include:

• Organizational culture not adequately adapted to support agile principles and a DevOps culture 
• Team members unwilling to accept change
• A blurred understanding of how Agile and DevOps impacts the overall organizational goals
• Quick testing and release cycles ignoring QA leading to poor quality end products
• Limited skills and talent

Regardless of the nature of the obstacles, adopting Agile and DevOps methodologies are a continuing learning process, and rest assured there's always light at the end of the tunnel. 

Of course, if you're overwhelmed, you can leverage expertise assistance companies like Pronix in your adoption journey.

Create an Agile and DevOps Roadmap

Agile and DevOps are never-ending exercises geared towards continuous delivery and continuous improvement for the fast delivery of high-quality products. That's where a roadmap comes in.

To create your Agile and DevOps Roadmap, you need to start with a competitive analysis. This informs you where your business stands among completion and what you need to do to create an Agile and DevOps-inspired mindset and organizational culture.

If you don't establish a baseline of where your organization stands vs. where your competitors are, you'll have no idea of the areas you need to focus on to catch up with and outdo your competitors.

A roadmap helps identify precisely where your company needs to improve, the objectives, and benchmarks. It's also here that you will decide on processes and the right tools required to harness the benefits of Agile and DevOps for your enterprise.

Start with a detailed strategic plan and then break it down one at a time with several stages for evaluation and reflection. This can help you quickly figure the answers to some critical decisions ahead of time for a smooth adoption process, plus insights on when to scale.

Communication and Collaboration 

Your teams' relationship has a significant impact on how successful your Agile and DevOps adoption will be. Enduring success is a team effort that requires everyone to be on the same page.

People are the backbone of practicing successful Agile and DevOps. Not technology. Technology is just an enabler of your software development blueprint.

Departmental conflicts and silo-mentalities are among the setbacks that will cut short your adoption strategy. As such, every team member needs to be aligned with what you're doing, why you're doing it, and share the same understanding of long-term business objectives.

It helps create a free flow environment ideas and suggestions are welcome from anyone. 

To improve your chances of success, there should be policies to ensure that every step is made and executed correctly, on time, and with all relevant teams involved.

Connect With Your End Users 

As a business, your customers are your greatest assets. Without them, your business ceases to breathe life. 

For this reason, any successful Agile and DevOps strategy is deep-rooted in user research and feedback. 

By creating meaningful connections with your customers, you will understand their actual needs, illuminate their trends and preferences, and potential pain points while getting continuous feedback.

Not only is this research necessary for developing quality products, but it also aids in customer support and the development of new product campaigns that will attract new users.

Train and Educate Your Teams

Many organizations mistakenly assume that their in-house development and operations teams can handle their Agile and DevOps adoption processes sufficiently. 

While this assumption may hold for some, it's the complete opposite for many. More often than not, organizations lack well-trained teams or have talent gaps, particularly when other teams aren't trained as developer teams. 

There also tends to be an assumption that both teams can quickly learn Agile and DevOps technologies to meet the company's development needs. 

Poorly trained employees show low levels of engagement, productivity, and motivation. As a result, your adoption strategy may fail.

If you abruptly initiate your strategy without training everyone on board. Hire experts to come in and teach about Agile and DevOps processes and how they can scale your organization. This can be done via presentations, workshops, seminars, webinars, and real case scenarios.

Ready to Move Your Business forward with Pronix Agile and DevOps 

Agile and DevOps provide an exciting avenue to scale your organization. It's the chance to realize new possibilities, revolutionize how you deliver products and services, and leverage technologies. 

They facilitate an organization a shift in organizational mindset and culture driven by innovation and resiliency throughout your organization. 

Consequently, teams and stakeholders are equipped with the right resources and support to develop enhanced processes for better and fast product delivery. 

Let the Pronix team help you explore all the possibilities and start taking the first steps on your business's Agile and DevOps journey.