Understanding IT Infrastructure and DevOps as a company's differentiating capabilities

What lays at the heart of most companies' operating capabilities? Of course, information technology (IT) infrastructure! Companies with more complex operational characteristics rely on new bleeding edge technologies in their IT infrastructure. Effective infrastructure enables business' capabilities, ineffective - destroys them. The deepest challenges in the IT infrastructure management is bridging the decision making between business and technology domain.

If company's core business is in technology, and in particularly in software technology, then there is another very important component of bridging IT with business. It is so called DevOps.  DevOps is a combination of words "development" and "operations". According to Wikipedia it means a "software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) operations professionals". For business it means enabling business agility and aligning with IT infrastructure.

For business to be competitive it needs ability to implement changes or innovations very fast. A life-cycle from the development to operation can use different project management methods.  Latest trends in the project management methodologies are agile frameworks.  Even these approaches are faster and more adaptive than waterfall, sometimes they are not fast enough for a business. So, DevOps helps making agile development to be more agile and prevents from  elevating of risks of premature pushing to operations. DevOps solutions comes from shifting company culture towards measuring performance, unifying processes and tools.DevOps tools are a big part of the concept. The buzz words are “infrastructure as code”, “model driven automation”, and “continuous deployment”. Choice of right tools and their implementation eliminates a lot of manual work and foster automation.

As a result their adoption makes a big difference in improving company's agility. Speed of implementing changes that enable new business capabilities comes from the contemporary IT infrastructure and DevOps. Ability of a company to recognize this fact and adopt, invest accordingly is a game changer. 

SCRUM - Product Owner and ScrumMaster

I was working in the Scrum framework  for the last 4 years. My role is a Product Owner. It has been a journey with many challenges, opportunities and lessons learned. Despite the fact that there is a clear trend that more and more companies adopt agile development, it doesn't make it easier to bring up to speed any new project participant. It is hard for newcomers to understand right away the SCUM's benefits. It is not easy to make them think and act withing the framework and have relevant expectations. I would say that it doesn't matter if a  a new participant is in the development team or on the business side, it is equally demanding to make them grasp the SCRUM process. Having geographically dispersed teams makes managing adoption, changes to the new processes for newcomers even more complicated. In a series of posts I will share my "lessons learned" and knowledge from my  previous researches and training. Since I am a project manager by trade, it is part of my professional obligations to educate about project management and in this case about Scrum.

In a very simplified description  there are four  main roles in Scrum:

1. Stakeholders
2. Product Owner
3. Team
4. ScrumMaster.

Here is a good diagram that I have borrowed from the site describing pretty well these roles




However, in practice it is more complicated than fitting all participants into these well defined roles and expect the desirable behavior from them. A big part of the success in the SCRUM adoption process are Product Owner and Scrum Master. In the real life and especially in the geographically dispersed teams their responsibilities sometimes are not well understood withing a company which cause them sometimes to fulfill partially each other roles.

Here is an excerpt from the  Andrew Pham and Phuong-Van Pham book "Scrum in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development " about qualities for people in these two roles.

The seven qualities of a great Product Owner are:

1. Know how to successfully manage the stakeholders’ expectations and sometimes conflicting priorities.
2. Have a clear vision and knowledge of the product.
3. Know how to gather requirements to turn the product vision into a good product backlog.
4. Be fully available to actively engage with the team, not only during the sprint, but also during the release and sprint planning.
5. Be a good organizer who can juggle multiple activities, while keeping things in perspective and maintaining her composure.
6. Know how to communicate the product vision; not only to the team, but also with the business, so their trust in the team remains intact throughout the life of the project.
7. Be a good leader, able to guide, coach, and support the team as needed while making sure that the business gets the value they expect out of IT.

The seven qualities a ScrumMaster should have are:

1. In depth theoretical and practical knowledge of Scrum
2. Great servant-leadership ability
3. Strong organizational skills
4. Great communication skills
5. Excellent presentation skills
6. Conflict resolution skills
7. Excellent human development skills.

Big part of the Product Owner and Scrum Master responsibilities is to protect a team from the external environment.  

Source: Scrum in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development by Andrew Pham and Phuong-Van Pham.  

By my humble opinion, a big part of the SCRUM success in  IT projects is having a baseline for project inputs, outputs, tools, roles, expected behaviors as in any framework build on practicality. 

So, educating new project participants is a very important part of any company that wants to harvest from the Agile frameworks used in IT development.  

Are You on the Cloud?

I am pretty sure that most of technical people are aware about the technical term "cloud", and even can give some kind of description about what does it mean. The well known association of the cloud computing is with the software as a service, SaaS. However, there are more and more areas of IT services which are moving to the cloud. So, knowing the acronyms for such cases is a part of the IT literacy.

I have filled a survey today "Managing Cloud Applications" posted by the The Office of the CIO®  in collaboration with Katepano SaaS Monitoring and Optimization which reminded me about my intention to create this post and to list all abbreviations.

Here is the list of the cloud services that I am aware of:

PaaS - Platform as a Service
 BaaS - Backup as a Service
BPaaS - Business Process as a Service
CaaS - Communication, Content, and Computing as a Service
DaaS - Database as a Service DaaS ( another one) - Desktop as a Service
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
IDaaS -  Identity as a Service
MaaS - Monitoring/Management as a Service
NaaS - Network as a Service
SaaS ( another one) - Storage as a Service
SECaaS - Security as a Service
UCaaS - Unified Communications as a Service
APMaaS - APM (Application Performance Management) as a Service 
LaaS - logging as a service 

Here are some other acronyms that go together with the cloud:
SOA - Service Oriented Architecture
SOCCI - Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure

As you can see, there are so many IT service already on the cloud that they are even reusing the same surnames. According to industry definition by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the "as a service" acronym formed a category XaaS which unites all cloud-related services.

The IaaS was pioneered by Amazon. UCaaS becomes a popular because it is easy to outsource. The MaaS is almost a requirement for IT that uses cloud.  The NaaS is a choice for the mature large companies because they want to get out of the IT business.

According to the market forecasts, by the 2015 year the XaaS market will be more then $40 billions. Microsoft's latest strategy shift to the cloud with its offering of the SkyDrive cloud storage service and cloud-based Office 365 is a strong evidence of the industry shift to the cloud.

So, are you YOU on the cloud? Do you use other then listed above services?


Resources: NETWORK WORLD, August 13, 2012. Volume 29, Number 14.

Information Technology Management: Visualize Your Experience

Information Technology Management: Visualize Your Experience: Do you know that you can present your resume through infographics by using free ans easy tools that pull out info from existing sites.

Visualize Your Experience

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Social Media Demographics - infographic

Via: Online MBA Resource social media

Word clouds from the words used on sitecore.net, created with Wordle

Digital presentation of Sitecore on twitter  http://bit.ly/xRXgCJ