This year, my husband and I decided to FINALLY spend some money on the house. We started our conversation about home improvement at the end of 2018, thinking about “the list”: need, want, nice to have. We went through the exercise of writing separate lists to compare and prioritize. Quite frankly, I was surprised at how similar they were. We quickly realized there was a need to actually organize and prioritize instead of working on notebook paper, fridge magnets, and the occasional sticky note.

What is DevOps?

Before we go into depth about the three phases required to fully operate as a DevOps organization, you must first understand DevOps, which has become an increasingly important framework in organizations. DevOps refers to a set of best practices that empower both the operations and development teams to perform more efficiently, exceed organizational goals, and drive long-term business strategy. 

Our partners at Puppet and Splunk recently released the State of DevOps Report 2018 which mirrors many of the same observations that we see when working with our customers. DevOps isn't a sprint, it's a journey, depending on the organization's size, that can take organizations months or years to master. Instead of focusing on statistics like in prior years, this year's report introduces the five stages of a successful DevOps evolution and identifies and describes the practices successful, mature organizations have implemented during their journeys. The report has something to offer to organizations no matter where they are in their process. Even if your organization has employed DevOps for some time, you may be missing a critical component of your implementation.

As with life, the only constant in DevOps is change. To position your teams to seamlessly flow with the changes and to empower them to innovate, some of the old ideas on Operations and Development practices must be left behind. An integral component of DevOps is culture. An iterative approach to a collective ownership should be taken when planning your move toward a DevOps environment. You can start your DevOps journey by advocating for the adoption of a consolidation of tools designed specifically for DevOps, which provides an environment of transparency and ease of use.

Investing in technology should be exactly that: an investment. Technology should accelerate your business and allow you to deliver products and services to your customers more quickly. In a word, DevOps. At Praecipio Consulting, not only do we help organizations adopt DevOps best practices, but we work in it every day with our products and even within our services organization. Investing in the right technology to drive your DevOps initiatives should net you a significant ROI, but why?

https://www.praecipio.com/webinars/portfolio-for-jira-best-practicesIn our last blog post, we shared with you how Portfolio for Jira can be used to plan and visualize work for any department or line of business. Now that everyone has a seat at the table, let's make sure the meal is excellent by following a trusted recipe for Jira Portfolio best practices.  

It's only a few days into the new year, but already we see the latest tech crazes for the next 346 days in the headlines: DevOps, ITSM, and SAFe. With Atlassian, the world's industry leaders have had great success in these frameworks (many with our expert help) and technology is producing the most ground-breaking things in human history. Everybody wants to put a proverbial man on the moon with their next release, and these are the proven methods to do so. 

As Development and IT Ops teams look to be more efficient, decreasing their time to market and increasing product support, DevOps has become the predominant industry solution. There are many resources that paint a picture of the ideal processes for Development and Operations working harmoniously together- but how do we actual get there? Where should we start?