The Culture of Hyperautomation: DevOps and Agile
While hyperautomation provides powerful benefits, there are several areas outside of the technology itself that organizations must take into consideration before and during implementation. Most importantly, they must understand how their organization’s culture will shift with the implementation of these hyperautomation projects. You can’t have efficiency and productivity with automation if your culture does not prioritize teamwork, communication, and fast turn-around.
DevOps is an extremely viable choice for combining culture and technology to maximize the productivity that hyperautomation provides.
What is the DevOps Approach?
Hyperautomation incorporates different technologies to extend the benefits realized from standalone automation solutions such as RPA. Implementation of any new technology requires contributions from multiple units within a company such as business operations, IT, change management, compliance, CxOs, and more. Typical delivery methodologies such as Agile can easily accommodate the needs for implementation of standalone technologies.
Hyperautomation integrates multiple technologies so the organizational units that are involved become even more fragmented. Multiple departments within departments must coordinate in order to deliver a holistic solution that is functional and on time. This is where DevOps comes in.
Where other work methods separate development and operations processes, waiting for one team to completely finish a project before it can be tested, implemented, and evaluated, DevOps eliminates the barriers between steps when deploying software.
This is done through Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) — automated processes which assist at sending small amounts of code through the entire process, making sure the software works ideally, and quickening the production time.
DevOps focuses on continuous production, not just iterative production. This means that, with automation, groups from both the technical side and the operations side can unite to evaluate and analyze new code as soon as it is provided which “leads to improving quickly enough to satisfy the velocity needs of every process.”
TechTarget simplifies the idea, saying “you can visualize a DevOps process as an infinite loop, comprising these steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor and—through feedback—plan, which resets the loop.”
DevOps isn’t just governance for the development and operations processes—it’s a culture shift for the whole organization, highlighting the importance of speed, communication, failing fast and failing early, and resolving issues as they arise. It is also suited very well to accommodate unique change management, approvals, auditing, and other checks and balances that are associated with the different technologies that fall under the hyperautomation umbrella.
Why Use DevOps?
DevOps encourages teamwork and the continuous development of products, but how does this governance benefit the business compared to what might currently be in place?
DevOps, when implemented correctly, can show a major ROI for the organization because it emphasizes fast-paced improvements, meaning that your team can be the first to market with a new idea or feature.
Additionally, CI and CD make all code accessible by every member at every stage of production, meaning that it is constantly improving. This leads to not only faster processing but also constant improvements in quality and increased operational stability, preventing costly anomalies or outages.
Faster to market. Less failure. Faster recovery.
DevOps V.S. Agile
Before DevOps, there was Agile. Agile is a continually valid and ground-breaking governance method that focuses on collaboration and short bursts, or sprints, of development that move quickly, similar to DevOps.
Each Agile sprint iterates off of the last one, allowing for flexible code that can easily change to the demands of the market. Agile inspired the creation of DevOps as a way to extend Agile’s methodology into the production aspect rather than just the collaboration and project-establishment aspects.
Even though Agile’s methodology proved to be game-changing for software development, the iterative, the rapid code development it practiced did not always lead to iterative, rapid code deployment. DevOps was created to tackle this.
Now, some consider DevOps to be a counterculture to the main IT management models. Where Agile focuses on delivering and aligning to what customers want, DevOps cares more about constant testing and delivery. DevOps sees the faster release of software based on the collaboration of previously siloed and separated teams. Agile doesn’t quite disintegrate the idea of teams as DevOps does, but its smaller teams work closely with each other to quickly adapt to consumer demand.
So why choose one over the other? The short answer is that you don’t have to. But there are important considerations to make.
Creating a DevOps culture does take time and effort. It is important that your organization creates a business case to justify this transition.
Agile focuses on larger releases, however, with demand changing so often, something may be released after needs and requirements for it have been changed. To avoid this, it is important for organizations to align their delivery timelines with their innovation roadmaps. No one wants to deliver a new solution that is already outdated once it is ready to be used.
But these differences do not mean your company must choose one over the other. DevOps and Agile can coexist. Organizations who combine the methodologies of DevOps with the framework of Agile see improved productivity and market value.
The Takeaway
There are multiple ways to approach the delivery of a project, but DevOps and Agile both seem to stand out in the crowd. Novatio excels at pairing the right technical resources with the right delivery methodology (DevOps and Agile) to meet your organization’s goals. This is essential as companies move from legacy RPA automation to hyperautomation that leverages a larger ecosystem of technology.
To learn more about Novatio’s unique delivery methodology, contact us.
