CA Technologies has announced the results of a global study which shows that some organisations are struggling with the key challenges and missing out on the extensive benefits that agile and DevOps can have.
The study, ‘How Agile and DevOps enable digital readiness and transformation, found that, while 75% of respondents recognise that agile and DevOps approaches drive significant business success when implemented together, only a small proportion consider the consistency, depth and breadth of usage of these practices to be high.
It showcases the characteristics of ‘Agility Masters’ (the top 18%), which are organisations that are the furthest along in the full adoption and doing most or nearly all of the right things to make agile and DevOps an essential part of how they function.
These ‘Agility Masters’ are also more likely to use agile practices across other company functions.
“The pressure is on to make all parts of an organisation as flexible as possible when responding to changing customer demands, user expectations, regulatory changes and – most important of all – market opportunities,” said Jaco Greyling, Chief Technology Officer for Enterprise DevOps at CA Southern Africa.
“Business leaders need to be aggressive and intentional about driving adoption of agile and DevOps within their organisations.
“The success of their business depends on it.”
It’s Not All About Technology and Process: The People Perspective
The study also found that organisations are plagued by similar challenges: culture, skills, program investment and leadership alignment.
The research highlights a widespread recognition that implementing agile and DevOps practices across the software life-cycle is not just a matter of new skills and working patterns.
For some, it also requires a significant shift in mindset and behaviour and making those changes is very much a people issue – even at the executive level.
Top priorities to improve effectiveness identified by respondents include:
- Improve the culture of the organisation so it encourages and rewards collaboration (84%)
- More support and commitment from management at all levels (82%)
- Training for IT teams on how to collaborate and incorporate best practices into their day-to-day jobs (78%) and additional resources to help implement agile and DevOps practices (75%)
- Relieve time pressures so teams can implement effective agile and DevOps practices (74%)
Respondents also found it very difficult or challenging to find professionals that were familiar with agile methods (68%), had experience with DevOps (77) and/or had collaborative cross-team working experience (67%).
This indicates a skills gap for the majority of organisations, which requires resources, especially training, to be made available.
“Raising the capability of the engineering team through a well-crafted careers development program will allow us to continue to recruit and retain high calibre individuals,” said a Chief Architect/CTO of a retail business interviewed for the study.
Connecting Execution to Business Outcomes
The connection between agile, DevOps and business outcomes centres around the continuous feedback loop running through live customer experiences to requirements engineering – showing how well software delivery is performing and supporting the business itself.
To further reap the benefits of agile and DevOps, organisations must also leverage the responsiveness and flexibility offered by cloud, containers and other new code design and delivery architectures, with a smooth shift-left of all activities – such as continuous testing – and finer granularity of iteration across the whole of the software delivery and ops cycle.
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