Successful Operations efforts balance several competing factors:
- Strategic (long term) versus tactical (short term). There is a fine balance between ensuring operational safety while enabling the evolution of operational systems.
- Operations needs versus organizational needs. You want to not only optimize the flow of operational work but do so within the context of your larger organization – Context Counts.
- Standardization versus evolution. To reduce the overall cost and risk associated with operations, and to simultaneously make it easier for development teams to test and release changes into production, you want to standardize as much of your IT infrastructure as possible. Yet your infrastructure cannot be allowed to stagnate, it must safely evolve over time – Hence the need to work with your Enterprise Architecture efforts to envision the future and run experiments so as to learn how to evolve towards that vision.
- Team DevOps versus organizational efficiency. The DevOps philosophy of “you build it, you run it” is very attractive to individual delivery teams, and it certainly makes sense for smaller organizations. But for organizations with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of delivery teams working in parallel your costs and risks quickly skyrocket. These organizations quickly realize that having a flexible operations/infrastructure team to support the delivery teams to leverage common infrastructure and guidance will help to optimize the overall workflow across your Disciplined Agile Enterprise – Follow the Be Pragmatic principle.