Chances are that your IT organization is structured in different departments, such as development, quality control, and operations. Although the names may vary across companies, the idea is to group people that execute similar work or have similar expertise. When you go around and ask people why this grouping is helpful, the answers typically revolve around easier management, consistency in work approach, better communication, and knowledge sharing.

In order to further improve themselves, each department sets out to adopt industry standard approaches: projects are moving away from waterfall to agile methodologies and within the operations world, ITIL, CMMI, and ALM are being adopted. While there is certainly great value in the underlying ideas, we would like to warn people of the havoc it can create in the following ways:

• As each department becomes more proficient at its work, the risk is that its members start optimizing their own world view.

• This will result into striving toward local optima instead of global optimum.

• The result is that the velocity we gain in development gets lost in IT.

Sometimes, when the pressure in the whole chain becomes insupportable, we see managers instinctively change their approach: they call together a special cross-departmental workgroup to tackle the issue at hand. Once solved, they fall back to traditional structures. Agile has shown us that there are clear benefits from working in cross-functional teams. As natural evolution, it's time to tackle the cross-departmental boundaries between development and operations.

Devops, as a culture, seeks to restore the disconnect between projects and operations and is driven by:

• Collaboration culture. In a competitive world, this collaboration will be your differentiator: operations is no more a cost center but one of the needed skills inside your project team to deliver what the customer wants. We get more value from collaborating generalists than from separate specialist entities.

• Automation. With the evolution in virtualization, cloud, configuration management, and infrastructure as code, operations can start automating their work to make it easily reproducible. They are getting on par with their peers from development. Need a new setup? We'll leverage some API and make sure it's monitored, all within a few hours, instead of the traditional long delivery delays.

• Testing and metrics. Automation without putting the appropriate tests into place is suicide. They should act as brakes on a car, providing you the safety in case something goes wrong.

In a way, the devops call is similar to "Think Globally, Act Locally": first make people aware of the damage they cause to the whole IT ecosystem and then it calls for people in the different departments to work together toward the global goal: delivering business value. We see that companies adopting the devops drivers have found that their traditional practices need some adjustment. Here are some examples:

• Make developers carry pagers for production systems so they will care more about problems in production.

• Make operations co-responsible for the throughput of stable changes, so they care more about the features.

• Make the customer aware of the conflicts between pushing out new features and asking for an uptime SLA.

• Change HR policies to make people responsible for the whole chain and not just part of the chain.

• Make sales responsible for both the initial sale and the operational result.

Those who remember the early days of an organization or work in a startup recall that working in a world without barriers really helps you get your job done. As the company grows, these barriers grow and silos can emerge. Over the coming months, Cutter's Agile Practice expects that companies will share more stories of adopting devops enterprise strategies (see Cutter IT Journal Call for Papers: "Devops: A Software Revolution in the Making?"), and a complementary set of good practices will emerge from it. Therefore, we call for a "back to our roots" action and encourage you to screen your existing situation for conflicts and act upon it with a devops mindset.

I welcome your comments about this Advisor and encourage you to send your insights on agile/lean techniques and practices in general to me at pdebois@cutter.com.

-- Patrick Debois, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium