How to Scale Agile and DevOps for New Levels of Competitiveness

97% of companies expect to keep some level of remote working post-pandemic. So, to stay competitive, companies must speed up application integration, development, and delivery. 

To adapt to changing customer needs and market opportunities, companies need flexibility. Because of this, many companies are turning to agile and DevOps - those that master them see a 60% higher revenue and profit growth than their competitors.

Currently, though, only 18% of companies are agility masters. Many companies are implementing agile and DevOps in their IT departments. But agility masters practice agile and DevOps throughout their organization. In other words, they've been scaled. This is crucial for companies to stay competitive. How do companies scale agile and DevOps? That’s the question this article will answer. 

But first, you need to know what agile and DevOps are.

What Is Agile?

Agile is a development approach that emphasizes teamwork and customer feedback. Agile teams continually improve their software based on customer needs. Why do customers need software and what kind, are key questions in agile frameworks. 

Agile frameworks have a lean manufacturing approach to delivery. This reduces production and response times, enabling the short release cycles that make agile so adaptable. This is crucial if teams are to keep pace with changing customer requirements. 

Agile Procedures 

Having the best team task management software is a must for agile teams. Visual workflow productivity tools like Scrum and Kanban can organize tasks and track progress. They also allow teams to maintain a consistent pace of development using timeboxing (allocating a fixed amount of time to each stage).

Agile development consists of incremental timeboxes called sprints. Agile teams adapt future sprints based on the outcome of the previous sprint. Each sprint follows the same framework, ensuring consistency and keeping the focus on individual users.

Let’s look at auto dialers as an example. Auto dialer software automatically dials phone numbers and then plays a recording or connects to an operator. After Sprint 1, an agile team could have a draft autodialer. After Sprint 2, they could have a prototype. After Sprint 3, they could have a working auto dialer that’s ready for market. 

What Is DevOps?

DevOps (development operations) is a culture that fosters teamwork to provide value to customers. It focuses on maximizing efficiency through business process automation. DevOps brings together cross-disciplinary teams from areas like product development, IT operations, quality assurance, and security.

By coordinating their efforts, cross-disciplinary teams can better respond to customer needs. They can also reduce production times, allowing companies to get products to market faster. DevOps encompasses all stages of the application lifecycle - from planning through to development and testing, delivery, and operation and monitoring.

DevOps Procedures 

The “dev” in DevOps is continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). If you’re wondering what is continuous integration, don’t despair. It just means developers regularly merge code changes into a central repository. This repository is then used in continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is when developers use automated tools to build and test user environments and improve software code.

The “ops” in DevOps is continuous deployment. Developers use continuous deployment to put the results of CI/CD into production. Like continuous delivery, it involves automated actions.

Other DevOps procedures include:

• Version control: tracking different versions of a code, making code easy to review and recover. 

• Infrastructure as code: treating system resources as if they were code. This ensures developers deploy resources in a consistent and controlled manner through automation.

• Configuration management: managing the state of system resources like servers and an ETL database. This allows teams to roll out changes without modifying system configuration.

• Continuous monitoring: monitoring system performance and health by collecting data and setting alerts.

What Does Scaling Agile and DevOps Mean?

First of all, it’s important to note that agile and DevOps are not mutually exclusive. Both approaches offer businesses a tried-and-tested framework to speed up software development. And like workforce management solutions, they can maximize employee efficiency and productivity. 75% of businesses already recognize that agile and DevOps are more effective when used together.

Scaling agile and DevOps means the entire organization adopts their practices. But few companies expand them beyond software development and IT. 

Any company can adopt agile and DevOps at scale, from SaaS companies to cloud contact centers. If you’re asking what is a cloud contact center, it's an internet-based call center - making it the perfect place to use agile and DevOps at scale. 

Let’s take a look at some of the scaled agile and DevOps frameworks available.

Scaled Agile Frameworks

There are many scaled agile frameworks available, including:

• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): combines lean, agile, and DevOps practices to coordinate team effort. SAFe is the most popular framework, with 37% of agile companies using it. 

• Scrum@Scale (S@S): separates the how (product delivery) from the what (product planning) into two overlapping cycles. 

• Large Scale Scrum (LeSS): organizes teams around different product features. For instance, in SaaS application development, there could be one team for voice features and another for security.

• Nexus: like S@S, it aims to reduce complexity and coordinate work between teams. 

• Disciplined Agile (DA): focuses on the ‘what’ by showing how business functions work together at scale. But it leaves the “how” up to businesses. 

Scaled DevOps Frameworks

SAFe is a scaled framework that applies to DevOps as well as agile. But there are frameworks specific to DevOps that focus on automation. This, paired with automation testing, allows teams to focus on innovation, making their products more competitive. 

DevOps frameworks include:

• Ansible: automates configuration management (CM), application delivery, and application deployment, among other things. 

• Puppet: offers tools to automate product development, delivery, monitoring, and modification. 

• Chef: allows businesses to automate processes across multiple servers and devices. 

• Salt: focuses on dynamic communication and automation. Uses range from managing a customer support tech stack to infrastructure management. 

• Jenkins: an automated server that offers a range of plugins to integrate with virtually every tool in the CI/CD toolchain. 

The Challenges of Scaling Agile and DevOps

There are many challenges businesses face when trying to scale agile and DevOps, including:

• Organization culture: 43% of companies say organization culture is at odds with agile values; 42% say their organization resists change, and 75% say silos hamper their efforts.

• Lack of skills: 42% of companies say their teams lack the skills to implement agile.

• Lack of technology: on average, DevOps teams spend 27% of their time on manual CI/CD tasks, making it hard to practice DevOps at scale.

• Lack of leadership: a lack of participation from management hampers 41% of companies.

• Fragmented toolchains: 30% of companies say toolchain complexity hampers DevOps success, and 61% say fragmented toolchains impede innovation.

To scale agile and DevOps, companies must overcome these challenges. Let’s look at exactly how to do this.

How to Scale Agile and DevOps

The solutions to some challenges are simple. For example, to overcome a lack of skills, companies can invest in training. Other challenges are more deep-rooted, like organizational culture and lack of leadership development training. Others need a technological solution. 

To scale agile and DevOps, you need to:

• Foster collaboration

• Get managers on board

• Invest in automation

• Move from monitoring to observability

Foster Collaboration

Collaboration is a core principle of agile and DevOps. Cross-disciplinary teams are hotbeds of innovation. This is demonstrated by the success of collaborative events like hackathons. So to scale agile and DevOps successfully, you need to foster collaboration. 

To do this, managers need to instill a culture of open and honest communication. This starts at the top. Collaborative software like cloud computing can also break down silos and make teamwork easier. 

Get Managers on Board

To adopt agile and DevOps at scale, you have to start from the top. Top-down leadership helps people embrace the changes that agile and DevOps bring. It also helps to bridge the gap between dev and ops. So you need to get managers on board from the start. 

78% of managers agree their company benefits (or could benefit) from agile and DevOps at scale. But if managers are reluctant, company stakeholders and technology review boards can lead the way. Once managers see the benefits of scaled agile and DevOps - like increased productivity - they’ll be sure to get on board.

Invest in Automation

74% of companies already recognize the importance of automation. Automation reduces the time spent on manual tasks, giving teams more time to innovate. It also allows them to better manage their agile and DevOps toolchains. 

So, companies looking to scale agile and DevOps need to invest in automation. Automated platforms with a platform administrator can help companies integrate toolchains and speed up product development and delivery. Teams no longer have to choose between quality and speed. With automation, they can have both.

Move From Monitoring to Observability 

To scale Agile and DevOps frameworks, companies must move beyond monitoring to observability. In fact, 74% of companies say end-to-end observability will be crucial to DevOps in the future.

Observability is more than reacting to alerts. It allows teams to proactively optimize performance by tracking detailed metrics like the number of errors over a specific time. These metrics can also be combined with customer data. This gives companies a global picture of how their software performs and how customers use it.

Agile Companies Are Competitive Companies

Agile and DevOps give companies greater efficiency and speed, especially when used together. But to achieve new levels of competitiveness, companies must also use them at scale. 

To achieve this, companies must foster collaboration, get managers on board, and invest in automation and observability.