Bringing tech and business together

Pitfalls and possibilities

The harsh reality

Quite often organizations think they have good open communication lines and transparency between tech and business — developers and other IT professionals know how their work is aligned with business goals and how they enable end users and end-user solutions. It’s a common view that business needs are discussed openly, and everyone has a clear understanding of their role in the big picture.

However, it’s even more common to find developers — sometimes even team leads and product owners — who don’t really understand how their work is connected to the goals and objectives of their business, or how they should prioritize and allocate work to really drive towards those business goals.

Are developers and product owners really aware of how they fit in?

The underlying problem is often rooted in the separation of the worlds of tech and business. It’s just how IT and business have usually evolved in organizations, both working purely in their own domains and only collaborating when required — or forced to.

Attainable utopia

In the realm of DevOps, an organization needs to work as a team — one continuously communicating and collaborating DevOps team. Usually this fantasy is immediately shattered by forming a separate “DevOps team” that aims to bridge the gap between development and operations. Make no mistake, this is a great step away from totally siloed entities that only do their part of the work and then disengage. However, this is not real DevOps.

DevOps is a mindset, where a collective of people is continuously changing its work culture throughout all teams and domains to embrace an open and transparent, fluently collaborating whole. Everyone knows their part and can communicate their ideas and concerns to improve decision-making. While this is very rare, it’s very desirable to achieve.

Shattered or aligned, alone or together?

When an environment like this is enabled for an organization, the attitudes and views of the people in tech and business will be drastically and disruptively different — in the most positive way! No more arguing about “what is feasible with these resources and time” or “this has to be done right now or there won’t be a business to develop for anymore” — everyone is aligned to reach the best possible outcome with the available assets and resources. 

To achieve this, all it takes is motivation, lots of communication, getting to know one another on a deeper level, and a common agreement on goals and objectives and how they will be reached. Another important thing is agreeing on the common methods and metrics for the people involved, even if it’s hard to reach a consensus at the start.

Furthermore, with teams and domains empowered this way — transparent, communicative and measured — there’s less guessing about what can be achieved in a certain time span, such as a sprint. No more overloaded sprints that deliver only half of the story points or features. No more anguished team leads and product owners who have to explain to management why things still haven’t been done. And no more unrealistic demands from business to development and IT.

Baby steps start a marathon

At Polar Squad, we’ve wondered many times why it seems so difficult to increase communication and sharing. We recommend starting small to give the people the opportunity  to get used to new ways of connecting:.

• Improve documentation bit by bit, for example, how to successfully build and deploy

• Add a test where absent, develop a better one where needed

• Share knowledge and good practices, whether it be a tool or technology choices

• Enable each other

Do you shy away from others?

This is a great way for your people to start to get more familiar with other people in the organization and begin forming great working relationships. It’s how you start to make real improvements to processes and tools as well, almost like a byproduct. Is it human nature to shy away from all of this? Rest assured, it’s normal to feel nervous about  presenting your ideas and work to others, fearing being wrong or humiliated… possibly. However, with an empathetic approach and by taking small steps, people feel safer and open up more naturally as a result.

Constant communication. Constant improvement. Constant feedback. If you start nurturing these ideas, you’ll find yourself building a surprisingly concrete DevOps utopia based on these cornerstones, probably sooner rather than later. :)

Keeping it real

Some concrete ways to start collaborating and communicating better between tech and business:

• Start having small informal sessions between parties on a regular basis

• Create communication channels that unite and interest different teams (Slack and Teams channels, for example — formal and informal)

• Participate in dailies/weeklies

• Get involved in planning sessions by offering views and knowledge

• Ultimately have common cross-domain planning sessions where people are

• Engaged because they feel comfortable

• Experience ownership and can really take things forward

Just remember to start small:  the main goal is to maintain the momentum and pivot if needed

It’s also just as important to reach out to different levels of business and development, not just the closest neighbors! Remember to start small — keep the momentum going and pivot as soon as things feel like they’re not going in the right direction or starting to stagnate. 

With these schematics, you can build a solid foundation for DevOps Utopia

This takes dedication and ownership from the whole organization, not just devs, not just business, but everyone involved. An organization can never truly be agile or do DevOps as intended if there are parts of it that don’t participate and collaborate.

Despite the possible difficulties and potential challenges, you can do it! We’re here to help you at every step of the way, so you don’t have to figure everything out by yourself or reinvent the wheel while doing it. :) 

These words poured into this post came from our experiences and our hearts.

Jukka Paldanius
DevOps Advisor
jukka.paldanius@polarsquad.com

Katariina Vakkuri
DevOps Consultant
katariina.vakkuri@polarsquad.com

If you want to start your journey towards this DevOps euphoria, please be in touch! 

Let’s start with a DevOps Assessment and then continue the journey according to the findings from your assessment with a better understanding of all of your needs. 

Whether your organization needs advisory, coaching, training, or hands-on consulting services, we can work with you all the way and enable your organization to do more meaningful work!

Polar Squad — The Best DevOps Company*

*according to us