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Showing all posts by Noah Cantor
March 7, 2016 | DevOps
Businesses exist to make money; their purpose isn’t just to generate revenue, but to create profits, now and in the future. Generating profits means delivering products or services that people want to buy. The creation of what people want is the entire purpose of delivery pipelines. (NB: The rest of this article will use ‘product’ to refer to both products and services.)
January 29, 2016 | DevOps
DevOps is 2016’s tech holy grail – unified development and operations, both working to deliver what the business needs, quickly, reliably, and adaptably. Done well, DevOps transforms the way organisations work; it helps break down barriers between tech teams, and between technology and the rest of the business. Good DevOps is the antidote to increasing segmentation and specialisation within companies. With the promised benefits, is it any wonder that senior managers are pushing for it in organisations spanning all sizes and industries?
January 7, 2016 | DevOps, Software Consultancy
Good consulting is, by its nature, an act of collaboration. We recently helped a company with a variety of challenges – some architecture, some coding, some systems, some people, some process (normal consultancy challenges) – unique to this client. During the project, we formalised some things we had thought before, but which had never crystallised – all the work we did was transformative. Whether it’s a code review, process review, DevOps implementation, or outright transformation, the primary goal is the same – improving flow. Flow (sometimes known as throughput) is the movement of raw materials through a system to become finished goods. It’s analogy in the service industry is the movement of customer requirements through to usable solution. And we help improve it.
December 16, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps
In the rush to embrace DevOps, many organisations seek out tools to help them achieve DevOps nirvana; the magical tools that will unify Development and Operations, stop the infighting, and ensure collaboration. This search for tools to solve problems exists in many domains, but seems particularly prevalent in IT (it may be real, or a reflection of my exposure to IT). The temptation to embrace new tools as a panacea is high, because the problems in IT seem so pervasive and persistent.
October 30, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps
In some companies, the inevitable rapidly became accepted as the way to do things, and both development and IT operations worked together to figure out how to collaborate on building systems that satisfied development’s desire for change, and operations desire for stability. Outsourcing infrastructure, and all it implied, gave rise to Devops – the unification of business needs, developer delivery, and operational capacity – but it also gave rise to something else, in companies where the operations teams weren’t quite as quick to move – Shadow IT.
October 12, 2015 | DevOps
DevOps is transformative. This (hopefully) won’t be true forever, but it is for now. While the modern management practices of separating development and operations (and to a lesser extent, everyone else) prevail, the tearing down of the walls that separate them will remain transformative. In company after company, management and front-line staff are coming to realise that keeping functions separate, which are inherently interdependent, is a model for blame, shifted responsibility, and acrimony. It’s easy to divvy-up a company up based on function. To many people, it seems the most logical way to do it. Ops does operations, Dev does development, Marketing markets, etc. It seems much harder to do it any other way. So why do it?
September 24, 2015 | Software Consultancy
You’ve implemented a change in how things work, and people aren’t happy. You spent time investigating the problem, and putting serious thought into what the issue was, and you’ve put a fix in place that you were sure people would be happy with. They aren’t. Why not?
September 21, 2015 | DevOps
The drive for change comes from, everywhere. Within IT departments, developers are asking for more control, and want faster response times than can be provided by traditional gatekeeper IT services. Management hears about new technologies allowing more rapid deployments, better ROI, reduction in costs, increased efficiency, and increased scalability, and they want it for their customers. On top of that, systems age, technologies lose their lustre, and technical debt builds up, while it simultaneously gets harder to recruit people from a shrinking talent pool, all of which creates a case for change from within the technology itself.
August 11, 2015 | DevOps
For years, OpenCredo has been working with organisations to help them introduce new technologies, and more effective development practices, to their IT teams. This has met with a great deal of success, and we have worked with a variety of companies of various sizes. During these projects, we have consistently noticed that the changes we make reach beyond IT in their impact and effects.
