Agile Manifesto co-author encourages Agile Operations

Ward Cunningham, one of the godfathers of the Agile Development movement and the co-author of the Agile Manifesto, is moving over into Agile Operations territory these days with an upcoming webinar, Agile IT: A Better Approach to Application Development, Deployment, and Management. In the precis, the presenter's ask "Can IT Operations benefit from agile practices as well?" Obviously we here at Agile Operations think so, but it will be interesting to see what exactly Cunningham's take on the idea is.

The full precis gives some insight:

How often do Agile development teams finish their new web applications in record time only to wait weeks to go into production? New approaches like Agile development and Cloud deployment are enabling application teams to become faster, more responsive, and more cost-efficient. Can IT Operations benefit from agile practices as well?

Find out when you join EMA Research Director Julie Craig and New Relic VP of Sales and Marketing Mike Malloy for this one-hour Webinar where you will learn:

*How some organizations are moving new business software features into production in days, not months.
*How Operations and Applications teams can work together to form an “agile alliance.”
*How the on-demand SaaS model, which has transformed business applications, is now poised to change IT application management as well.
*How Cloud-based application management improves your team’s agility and cost effectiveness—but also demands a new approach to application management and support.

If you want to find out how your organization can benefit from Agile IT, this is a can’t-miss event!

The perspective seems to be about what you would expect from someone coming from a development shop, that the operations side of the house seems stilted and awkward in the deployment and operation phases compared to the speed and flexibility of the dev teams. It's true that a lot of IT shops haven't caught up with the devs yet in their change management and support roles, damping some of the greatest advantages of agile development, and that must be a source of great frustration to those developers. If development is cranking out new releases once every two weeks, but IT can only deploy once a month because of cumbersome release and support processes, it's defeating the purpose. It's only natural the developers would next turn to helping the operations team develop a similar tempo to allow the process to function properly.

That's a laudable goal and obviously one that I believe is entirely achievable. Yet historically I have seen many difficulties arise from development shop logic being applied directly to IT. The sensibilities and priorities are different, and it will be interesting to see if Cunningham, a life-long and accomplished development rock star, appreciates the differences or if he is simply carrying around an Agile stamp these days and slapping it on whatever business functions happen to be most frustrating at the moment.

Judging by the topics listed in the precis, I am optimistic, however. Those are exactly the factors in today's IT environment that have prompted the Agile Operations movement, and are some of the things I talk about most frequently when I am helping organizations move their IT departments in that direction. But they are also the cool, sexy new things to talk about; equally important are the more difficult and pedestrian requirements to emphasize change management processes, create a robust infrastructure that can support frequent changes, the necessity of re-organizing the department to align with a new conceptual framework of service delivery and building management support for the model, and implement controversial measures de-emphasizing IT control, such as fragile support. If you are offering up a webinar for movers and shakers I suppose you don't emphasize the less trendy topics, but it will be interesting to see what Cunningham chooses to address and how he pitches the concept. Definitely worth signing up for if you are interested in the Agile Operations concept.