Out of the box, Azure DevOps provides black-and-white capabilities in terms of how it can be utilized to support a project and its code repository. Over time, teams establish and settle into work processes, often continuing to use those basic settings, which can lead to a mundane operation and, perhaps, risk losing sight of the end goal.

Even if a project is customized in terms of workflow, custom state options, or custom fields, sometimes it is still difficult to know where things stand and what is important to focus on.

There are a few ways in which Azure DevOps can aid in making those items visible and obvious, to better help guide a team.

Leverage color to draw attention

When viewing a Board in Azure DevOps, it can often be overwhelming to look at or find specific work items. Consider: what is most important for the team to complete or prioritize, and, what could be a unique identifier to locate those items? These are the items we want the team to notice and work on first.

There are a couple of ways in which Azure DevOps allows us to style work items on a board:

• Card Styles
• Tag Colors

Let’s take an example of Card Styles: We want the client to quickly and easily see if items on the Board are blocked. In our board settings, we can use the Board Settings > Cards > Styles options to apply some rules to make any work items which contain the tag ‘Blocked’ to appear Red in color.

Example Settings:

Example Card Preview:

Another use case for applying Card Styles could be that we want our team members to prioritize and focus on any Bug work items which have a Priority of 1. In the same settings dialog, we can add another styling rule so that any Bug work item which has a Priority of ‘1’ should appear Yellow in color. This will make it extremely easy to find those Priority 1 Bugs when viewing the board, so that it is obvious to any team member who is assigned to one.

Example Card Preview:

Let’s look at one more use case – we want our team to easily recognize work items containing the tag ‘content.’ In this example, this tag means that the work item will require manual content steps, along with the code changes. In the Board Settings > Cards > Tag Colors options, we can configure a rule so that this specific tag will appear in Pink while viewing the board.

Example Card Preview:

TIP: While it is great to provide color styling rules to work items, it is best to reserve those rules only items needing specific, frequent attention. Consider this before applying any styling setting on a project’s Board.

Find key details in a dash on your Dashboard

Lastly, Dashboards are a fantastic way to provide fast, summary information regarding the progress of a team or project. Consider creating dashboards to display results of queries that you often find yourself referencing for reporting or oversight. Like the Backlog and Boards views, keep the dashboards focused on the most valuable information. Make it easily visible by organizing the most important widgets to the top of the dashboard.

In this example below, the team wanted to automate a way of finding work items which were mis-placed in the backlog or were without tags. A series of queries were created and used to provide data of matching results. In the first screenshot, there are no results, and all the tiles are equal to 0 – this is the ideal state. In the second screenshot, there are results in one of the tables and three of the tiles have a matching result of 1, in which case the tile is configured to turn Red in color. This makes it very easy for a team member to notice and take action to make sure specific work items are addressed quickly.

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

TIPS:

• • Create multiple dashboards, each with their own purpose, to prevent having just 1 or 2 dashboards being overwhelmed by too much information.
  • The ‘Chart for Work Items’ widget on the dashboards also allows for the color options to be customized. Consider this in cases where you want to draw attention to a specific attribute, such as work item State.

Paint the picture for your team

To help keep the team focused and from settling into a mundane work pattern, keep the most important data in Azure DevOps accessible and visible on project Boards, Backlogs, and Dashboards. Use visual indicators like color to help enable the team to quickly find what is most important to use their time most efficiently towards the project’s goal.

By using these simply tips and tricks, it will help to paint a masterpiece of a project that both the team and client will be better engaged in.

Customers are demanding a personalized experience, and manufacturing is no different. One-size-fits-all manufacturing is now becoming a thing of the past. Today, we are seeing a decline in the mass production of identical products in exchange for personalization and niche products. As consumers intensify their expectations for on-demand personalization and delivery within days of purchase, marketplaces that offer wide ranges of options without sacrificing price or availability, like Amazon, have been capitalizing on this shift in customer behavior.

To achieve low costs while offering high availability and personalized products, manufacturers must alter their operations to be flexible, focusing on creating a wider range of products that share common underlying components or production processes. Perficient is committed to advising manufacturers as they face these new challenges outlined in Forrester’s recent report, “Key Steps to Develop Your Manufacturing Operations Management Vision.”

Our Manufacturing Operations Management Capabilities

Forrester interviewed several service providers and manufacturers to gain a holistic understanding of the current state of manufacturing operations management (MOM). The report outlines the importance of achieving variety while maintaining low cost and high availability to thrive in this new landscape. Ultimately, Forrester concluded that exploiting economies of scope – where the unit price of a product decreases as the variety increases – is the solution.

According to Forrester, “To thrive in fragmented and restless markets, manufacturers must compete on economies of scope, sharing fixed costs between multiple product or asset variants to deliver the innovation, choice, and personalization that will win, serve, and retain customers.” Further, Forrester stated, “… to compete with innovation, manufacturers must modernize their supply chain and manufacturing operations to manage — at scale and velocity — the digital thread that links design, manufacture, and the ongoing operation and maintenance of assets… and boost manufacturing execution system (MES) interoperability with enterprise resource planning (ERP) scheduling solutions…”

We believe Perficient is uniquely poised as an end-to-end digital consultancy with deep industry expertise to partner with manufacturing brands embarking on this journey. Our established practices, from supply chain to commerce, offer a customized strategy that meets the organization in its current state and execution that secures long-term success. Our supply chain experts routinely help organizations in sales and operations planning, strategic sourcing and spend control, procure to pay, inventory and materials management, operations continuation, risk management, end-to-end supply chain visibility, and more.

Finally, our partnerships with the other technology providers listed in Forrester’s report, such as Oracle and SAP, further equip us with the expertise needed to help brands navigate their modernization.

Perficient’s Manufacturing Industry Expertise

Forrester interviewed leaders from Perficient’s manufacturing and supply chain teams while researching this report. Kevin Espinosa, manufacturing industry lead at Perficient, remarked:

“We believe our participation as a company interviewed for the report on Manufacturing Operations Management is a testament to how critical our industry expertise is for manufacturing companies working to transform their operations and meet their customers needs.”

Perficient is excited to continue to share thought leadership and perspective on emerging trends in manufacturing operations management. For more information, download “Key Steps to Develop Your Manufacturing Operations Management Vision,” (available for purchase or to Forrester subscribers) or contact our manufacturing and supply chain experts today.

DataFrame is a key abstraction in Spark which represents structured data and allows for easy manipulation and analysis. In this blog post, we’ll explore the various basic DataFrame methods available in Spark and how they can be used for data processing tasks using examples.

Dataset:

There are many DataFrame methods which are subclassified into Transformation and Action based upon the operation performed, you can learn more about these in this blog – Spark RDD Operations (perficient.com). Let’s see some of the basic and regularly used ones. Most of them needs to be imported from spark packages. In the examples the import statements can be found at the top and the ones that we are going to see below are almost SQL functions which are being incorporated on a DataFrame.

Viewing the Data with in the DataFrame:

show:

.show() is to view the data from the dataframe. This can be used when using from the Notebook or when running a job too.

display:

display() can be used when we need to view the data in a notebook this can’t be used when running in a job.

Selecting and Filtering from the DataFrame:

select:

.select() method can be used to select the columns that we need from the dataframe, the above sample shows a selection of one particular column from the dataframe. We can select multiple columns by adding to the select statement like

df.select("country","capital")

head:

.head() method can be utilized to get the first row from the dataframe which can be used when we need some maximum or minimum values of a particular column.

take:

.take() method provides us with the mentioned rows from the top of the DataFrame.

tail:

.tail() method provides us with the mentioned rows from the bottom of the DataFrame.

filter:

.filter() method can be used to filter the column based upon the column. We can provide the syntax in the sql fashion itself within the filter method.

drop:

.drop() method can be used to drop a particular column or a set of columns from the dataframe. The syntax for dropping multiple columns would be –

df.drop("column1","column2")

DataFrame Count:

count:

.count method gives us the count of the DataFrame. We can also use select and distinct methods to find the distinct count of a particular column with this syntax

df.select("column_name").distinct.count

Data Manipulation on DataFrame:

withColumn:

.withColumn() is to add or modify an existing column with a transformation. If the column is existing the transformation will be applied to that column itself. If the column in not present, there will be a new column that will be added at the end of the dataframe with the transformation.

withColumnRenamed:

.withColumnRenamed() is to modify the name of the existing column to a new column where the column name needs to be transformed will be given first and the desired output column will be at the last.

upper:

upper() is to change the cases of a column to uppercase.

lower:

lower() is to change the cases of a column to lowercase.

lit:

lit() can be used to add or modify a column with hardcoded value.

cast:

cast() method is to change the datatype of a column from one datatype to another.

na.fill:

.na.fill(“”) is used to fill the null columns with values.

substring:

substring() is used to substring a column.

length:

length() is to determine the length of the column.

concat:

concat() is to add two strings together.

trim:

trim() can be used to remove the spaces in the column. If a particular side alone needs to be trimmed then rtrima and ltrim can be used.

Distinct and Union on DataFrame:

union:

unoin() in DataFrame will give you all the values from both the DataFrame unlike the SQL union where it would result only in distinct values.  To get the distinct values we can use. distinct function.

distinct:

distinct() in DataFrame will return the distinct rows from the dataframe.

Sorting and Ordering on DataFrame:

orderBy:

orderBy can be used on a DataFrame to order by on a particular column. By Default, Spark will order by in ascending we can explicitly call out .desc to order by descending.

Optimization and Performance:

repartition:

You can use repartition to increase or decrease the number of partitions within the DataFrame. For more information about this, you can find it in the blog titled Spark Partition: An Overview / Blogs / Perficient

There are further optimization methods like persist and cache which you can find more about in this blog: Spark: Persistence Storage Levels / Blogs / Perficient

Joins:

The DataFrames can be joined with one another using the below syntax:

df1.join(df2,df1("col1") == df2("col2"),"inner")

Find more about DataFrame joins in this blog post titled: Spark: Dataframe joins / Blogs / Perficient

References:

Official Spark Documentation: https://spark.apache.org/docs/2.3.0/sql-programming-guide.html

The Databricks DataFrame Guide is available at https://www.databricks.com/spark/getting-started-with-apache-spark/dataframes

In Conclusion this blog provides some basic methods along with its syntax and examples.

We are now in the midst of unprecedented business upheaval and there is no shortage of recommendations and guidance on how companies should respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. But who is looking at the core elements of your operating model and what they will look like when this significant disruption abates?

As we know, the CDC has recommended that we limit all non-essential airline travel and several communities have issued “stay at home” directives. When these bans are lifted, how will your company respond? Companies are focused on “crisis management” and “response teams” to guide them through the coming months. But, who is looking beyond the immediate horizon?

One recommendation is to put a “transformation team” in place immediately to focus on preparing their company for post-COVID-19. Below are a few operating model areas to consider evaluating in the coming months:

• Strategy – Executive leaders need to determine if the core business strategy will be impacted and cascade these changes down to the functional leads effectively. Functional strategy and priorities should be re-examined and re-prioritized.
• People – There may be no greater impact to the business than the impact to our employees. As we transform, we need to determine if our people are prepared, trained, and understand their potentially new roles and responsibilities.
• Customers – Our companies and our customers are going through substantial changes. What is our plan to re-engage our current customer base? Are we able to expand our customer base? These discussions should happen now, not at the end of this upheaval.
• Processes – An environmental scan of core business processes should be completed to determine what processes were effective, evolved in the last few months, or broke down during the COVID-19 response. More importantly, the team should focus on what processes need to be changed to support the revised strategy and/or priorities.
• Product, Pricing, and Promotion – Coming out of the COVID-19 situation, companies will all be hungry to get “back on track” and re-establish their market share, regardless of their business. There will be a lot of ideas and efforts to re-define products, adjust pricing, and promote their products to consumers that will be ready to spend. These efforts have to be coordinated and aligned to avoid further disruption or confusion (internally or by the customer). Efforts should be started today.
• Technology and Data – Any deficiencies in the tech and data capabilities likely became very apparent as the business was stressed. Are we tracking these deficiencies and uncovered opportunities? Now is the time to determine the potential impact to our current roadmaps and technology budgeting.
• Governance – Governance takes on a lot of definitions and governs all types of processes. How did your governance construct maintain the business? The team should evaluate the elements that are, or should be, governed moving forward. These may include budgeting, initiative selection and management, technology and data, product, pricing, and promotion.
• Performance Measurement – One area that is often overlooked, especially in times of “normal business,” is performance measurement. If we cannot collect, disseminate, and communicate performance during regular business operations, how are we measuring performance in these difficult times. We should use this time to determine the critical measurements that guide our business and develop a plan to put these measures in place.
• Partners – Partners are a vital portion of many businesses today. While we may have been communicating with our partners, are we planning with our partners for a potential transformation of the business?

The last vital business operating model capability is the most important. How have we managed the change in the past few months? Effective change management is built around understanding the impact to our key stakeholders (employees, customers, partners, etc.), communicating changes effectively, and educating/training these stakeholders to help transform the the business. All of this is done while managing the changes today, and tomorrow.

In the midst of COVID-19, we as individuals are faced with personal challenges, including keeping ourselves and our families safe. For businesses, and especially retailers, the challenges continue as you look to support the struggling economy and maintain sales while in-store traffic is significantly reduced.

To remain agile during this time – and during any disruption to your supply chain – retailers should take advantage of an omnichannel strategy and rules-driven order management system to adjust the way you do business throughout the disruption. With the correct technology and strategy in place, you are prepared to make instant changes to your supply chain and reduce product fulfillment issues for your end customers.

Here are three order management strategies you can use to adjust during this unknown environment.

1. Ship-from-Store
   • While retail locations remain open, take advantage of that network to reduce operational costs and expedite shipping. Utilize in-store teams to carry out fulfillment tasks, as they have increased capacity due to lower-than-normal traffic.
2. Distribution Center-Only Shipping
   • While a lot of retailers are closing stores and/or reducing hours of operation, it’s important that your order management system automatically adjusts and fulfills customer orders from your distribution centers. This strategy looks simple, but it can only be executed correctly with an order management system that understands the reduced labor capacity and other restrictions.
3. Same-Day Delivery
   • Use your physical locations and order management system to identify nearby locations with inventory and deliver to nearby customers in need. In the current climate, it’s most pressing for merchants who carry everyday essentials – like groceries, personal products, and cleaning supplies. But as customer expectations are set, we’ll start to see this become the standard across other products and industries – like clothing, furniture, and decor.

We are currently working with our retail clients to modify their order management roadmaps to react to the current COVID-19 situation. For example, one of our beauty retailer clients quickly shifted their priorities to enable ship-from-store capabilities to address the current supply chain challenges. Understanding the importance of serving their clients, we are working around the clock to get this functionality rolled out in three weeks.

Depending on your organization’s digital maturity, enabling new order fulfillment capabilities does not require a large investment or extended roadmap. And, it will result in not only a significant ROI but an increase in your overall customer experience, both in times of uncertainty and times of stability.

If you’re having supply chain challenges in the current crisis, please reach out to our experts who can provide mission-critical advice to get you through.

The Operations Coordinator plays a key role in DevSecOps.  In my previous post, DevSecOps and Release Coordination, I introduced the idea of four key responsibilities in the DevSecOps mediated release management process. The idea is to consolidate the validation and approval steps from a “gated” process involving many approvers, and shift the actual work of validation earlier in development. To illustrate these necessary roles I have been using the technique of “personas”.  So far we have met the Release Coordinator and the Security Architect.  In this post, I will continue to introduce the next critical role in this process, the DevSecOps Operations Coordinator.

So if you will, please meet Sandy your Operations Coordinator.

Operations Coordinator Persona

As the Operations Coordinator, I ensure that all production applications are properly deployed, supported, and monitored.  I also ensure my team is prepared to immediately respond to any outages or incidents. 

I and my team are responsible for the applications that are in production environments.  We ensure that all applications are established with proper system monitors (including CPU, network utilization, storage, process memory, etc.) to allow for leading detection of potential issues before they result in an incident or outage.  Moreover, I coordinate with the Release Coordinator, Product Owner, and Security Architect to ensure that all scheduled application releases have been properly documented for support and troubleshooting.

Figure 1. DevSecOps Release – Sandy Operations Coordinator

As discussed previously, there are four required key system release readiness states (Figure 2). These four product statuses provide confidence to the release team that the software candidate has met all defined standards for production release. The team consists of the Product Owner, Operations Coordinator, Security Architect, and the Release Coordinator. This team represents the sole deciders for what is, and is not, releasing to production. The decision is influenced by product quality, compliance, and organization’s readiness to support. Each member of the release team is responsible for one of these states. This role ensures that both the target environment and the operations group is ready to accept responsibility for production support. During regularly scheduled release meetings, the team reviews each scheduled product release and capture the four readiness states. The product release moves forward with approval of all readiness states.

Tool Use and Workflow Responsibilities

The Operations Coordinator has the overall responsibility to ensure production environments are available, performant, and secure.  As part of the release coordination team, this translates to ensuring that all of the necessary software support artifacts are correct, concise, and complete.  While the Operations Coordinator is not responsible for creating the Run Book, he/she is responsible for reviewing the contents.  Moreover, if there are changes to the Release Plan (say by the addition of a new data source that must be connected), or additional environment elements are required (e.g. servers, load-balancers, etc.), then it is the Operations Coordinator who creates the necessary change tickets.  Finally,  a review is made of changes around monitoring, logging, and/or auditing tools.

Operations Coordinator – Tooling and Responsibilities

In short, the Operations Coordinator includes the following responsibilities:

• Review of all release-related documents (Run Book, Release Plan, Release Notes, etc.)
• Coordination with the Infrastructure team on necessary changes to production systems
• Update to the Incident Response Plan
• Monitoring of the release deployment automation for successful completion
• Verification of system logs and audit monitors post-deployment

Key Artifacts

There are several key artifacts that the Operation Coordinator either uses, tracks, or otherwise manages:

• Run Book – A description of error conditions, application start/stop procedures, configuration settings, security features, repair and recovery guide.  Typically, this is provided by the development team.
• Trouble Shooting Guide – A set of frequently asked questions for a specific application or system.  This is used by the call center in support of customer inquiries or other application issues.
• Release Plan – A detailed set of steps followed to ensure a proper application/system deployment into the production environment.  This is also typically created by the development team in partnership with operations.
• Incident Response Plan – A set of procedures to be followed in the event of an outage, incident, or other service interruption.  The plan should include contact points for support, notification, and coordination.  An incident response team (IRT) will execute the appropriate plan steps to return to normal operations and support root cause investigation.

Conclusion

The Operation Coordinator’s role in release coordination primarily focuses on the deployment process and subsequent production support.  This includes ensuring that all supporting documentation is up-to-date.  On-going production monitoring ensures the newly deployed system will continue to function as expected.  In this way, the Operation Coordinator supports the organization as a whole to promote business continuity and system availability.

Intelligent automation isn’t accomplished by a single technology working independently, but by a combination of different technologies working in concert: process orchestration, robotic process automation (RPA), and artificial intelligence (AI).

Automation is a driving force of digital transformation. Enterprises of all sizes pursue automation for a number of reasons, such as to increase customer satisfaction and engagement; focus employee attention on other business-critical tasks rather than repetitive ones; increase capacity; and improve efficiency.

As an executive, it is up to you to leverage all three components to achieve organizational goals, streamline processes, and improve your team’s effectiveness. Regardless of how you choose to leverage automation technologies, it is important to do so intelligently.

This means training your AI capabilities once and digitally enhancing your business processes to support end-to-end automation. Your automation platform should be scalable to any channel and maintain a consistent experience across all channels.

To learn more, download the guide here and learn how to effectively leverage intelligent automation in your enterprise, or submit the form below.

ServiceNow offers cloud based platform that delivers digital workflows. Using ServiceNow, the employees and customers can make quicker, smarter decisions and they are empowered to collaborate in a more productive and agile way.

ServiceNow recently released a new version called ‘New York’.  Ever wondered , why this name? Below is quick insight on ServiceNow version naming history.

• Till 2011, ServiceNow version named after seasons (month in which they are released).
• After 2011, ServiceNow has new naming approach based on a city, and following an alphabetical order.
• Previous version was named Madrid (Jan 2019) and hence the latest released version (July 2019) starts with N i.e. New York.

Following is the quick summary of the new features in the ServiceNow ‘New York’

Do you need help with your ServiceNow journey, Do you want a deeper understanding of the ServiceNow versions? Are you concerned about the migration? Get in touch with Perficient ServiceNow experts.

1. Do you manage a small or large fleet of vehicles that are critical to your business operation?
2. Do you have the necessary data to manage your fleets utilization, preventative maintenance, driver behaviors and route optimization?

If you answered YES to question 1 and NO to question 2 you should consider a implementing a telematics solution.

Telematics Overview

Telematics is the monitoring of location, movements, status, and behavior of a vehicle/driver. This is achieved by installing a GPS communications device in the vehicle that sends vehicle data and engine diagnostics to the dispatcher and/or Fleet Manager.

Robust telematics solutions can offer the following capabilities and more:
• Vehicle Tracking – Ability to view location of vehicles
• GEO Fences – Ability to set virtual fences around company yards or drop sites. When a geo fence is penetrated the vehicle sends a notification to configurable individuals. This functionality serves as theft control or provides live alerts when vehicle is close to home base or at a customer site.
• Driver Behavior – Monitors safety events such as speeding, hard braking, rapid acceleration
• Idle Time Monitoring – Tracks vehicle idle events and alerts interested parties. Truck idling poses an enormous fuel cost for companies managing large fleets.
• Preventative Maintenance– Actively monitors vehicle diagnostics i.e. oil pressure and transmits alerts when readings are out of specification.
• Electronic Logs – Eliminates manual paper based logs. When driver logs into the vehicle, the driver status is tracked based on the motion of the vehicle until the driver logs out. Regulators and Managers like e-logs as they are far more accurate than paper based logs and far more efficient.
• Electronic Vehicle Inspection – Mobile application that walks the driver through an inspection checklist for pre and post drive inspections.

Business Case for Telematics

I implemented a telematics solutions where the cost of implementation was funded solely with savings from idle time reduction. Drivers often leave vehicles running during the loading and unloading process. With the implementation of telematics, Managers receive active alerts for excessive idling events and are able to educate drivers and adjust idling behavior. One hour of idle time consumes 1 gallon of diesel fuel making the cost of a telematics implementation easy to justify and the benefits easy to communicate.

While idle time reduction provides tangible green dollar benefit, the real value of telematics comes from increased driver safety. Telematics provides the ability to detect unsafe driver behaviors such as speeding and hard braking. Armed with data, Managers can correct behaviors prior to the occurrence of traffic incidents. A single traffic incident can result in enormous financial liability not to mention the physical impact to those involved. That being said, any technology that can prevent such an incident is well worth the cost of implementation.

Summary

Telematics solutions offer a wide range of benefits from driver tracking to reduced idle time. These programs may have a tremendous ROI depending on the issues you are looking to address. Feel free to contact me if you are considering implementing a telematics solution and/or have any questions regarding implementation challenges.

Sean Breeze, Management Consulting Director
Cell: 303-916-7503  |  NASDAQ: PRFT  |  Perficient.com
eMail – Sean.Breeze@Perficient.com

While it’s impossible to know for certain what the future holds, trends can be a reliable predictor of what’s on the horizon. Our extensive work with supply chain has revealed several trends that we believe will be impacting supply chain in the near future.

These include:

1. Blockchain: Create immutable end-to-end data visibility into all aspects of a product’s lifecycle.
2. Internet of Things (IoT): Take advantage of operations data from deployed assets to improve analytics, maintenance, and efficiency.
3. Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP): Sales and operations organizations collaborate to align in order to ensure that materials are available to meet constantly changing consumer demands.
4. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Operations utilize technology in a way that efficiently eliminates bottlenecks in production.
5. Advanced Analytics: KPIs measure what success looks like across all functions related to supply chain and reduce risks the company faces. Know where material and information is at any time.
6. Perfect Order: Order fulfillment systems and processes are synchronized to ensure that your customers receive the right product, on-time, in perfect condition, with required documentation and invoicing without unnecessary user involvement.

When it comes to these trends, think about how you compare to your peers. Are you doing enough? Should you increase your focus in a particular area? Do you have a strategy to remain or become an industry leader? Ask yourself these questions, not just about the trends at hand, but also about the areas of business for which you are responsible and that you know best. It’s about pushing forward and ensuring your company is doing everything it can to strengthen its supply chain operations for the long term.

Check out our next installment of the supply chain blog series featuring Evaluation of the Maturity of Key Supply Chain Components.

We recently published a guide that explores these six leading trends in supply chain, as well as the importance of having a strong foundation to support them. You can download it by clicking here or filling out the form below.

Does your business structure help or hurt your DevOps move? “Organizational DevOps” is the enterprise level action for a DevOps strategy and tactics. There is a natural struggle when moving towards DevOps, but therein is the value. First some context …

Process or Project 

Operations management is the attempt to run things better – in the current steady state. Generally, ops tries to achieve a fixed scope (getting the job done) while minimizing schedule and resources.

Conversely, development attempts a change in response to disruption or update request. Development is project based. Generally, agile software dev involves maximizing scope with fixed schedule and resources.

There is nothing wrong with this contradiction. We almost always have both. From the highest level, the COO and CTO are often two separate roles.

Yet, this tends to get exaggerated with DevOps. The desire for shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases has made these differences more pronounced. You may call it “organizational DevOps magnification.” Yes, change is the new constant.

DevOps seeks to improve steady state efficiency (ops) through more frequent state changes (dev)!

Operations or Development

DevOps is both Dev and Ops

Whether you like the ops or dev, the whole view wins. DevOps is a two-way street. The thinking is that both sides work more closely with, be more like, and check each other.

DevOps drives the ops team to act more like a dev team. We see this in more development-like tooling, virtualization, test execution, creation of infrastructure as code, micro-service enablement, etc.

At the same time, DevOps drives the dev team to act more like an ops team. We see this (i) at project reqs time with more thought for architecture, production/analytics data/feedback, and (ii) in doing more risk analysis, change management and disaster recovery planning, etc.

We have (want) Ops driving Dev concerns and Dev driving Ops concerns. DevOps means both.

Organizational DevOps

So, how should an enterprise respond to the DevOps movement? It is clear that one or both of ops and dev teams have to adjust their most basic ethos. Albert Qian talks about “transforming the organization … for the better” and the “emergent business ecosystem.”

Team Measure

Imagine agile devs teams being held to an SLA and ops teams being measured by velocity of innovations delivered. Blindly force fitting a dev team to perform business running activities is not the answer. Nor is an ops team doing business changing activities.

Crazy talk: All three scope, schedule, and resources cannot at the same time be the highest priority.

Team Size

At first look, DevOps seems to be lowering the role and team size of [true] ops. But, at the same time making what remains of higher importance. This is because the final value proposition rests in ops. Ops is client facing and carries the company branding. There is a limit. This march ends with the scary sound-byte “NoOps,” which at the same time would have the most business value!

A trade-off exists and the company brand is in the cross-hairs. The stakes are high, so the business must find the same old balances:

• Versatility and reliability
• Development and operations
• Investment and return

There is nothing new here, but there is organizational DevOps magnification of the timing and effects of a good or poor choice.

Team Vision

Any DevOps effort has to come from a strategic vision of the highest level and not as a dev novelty. The two (or more) chiefs of ops and dev must know where they stand with each other. They must share a vision; this is “Organizational DevOps.”

The winning business will return the most ops value from the least dev investment.

DevOps was first introduced in 2008 as an extension of proper development, but shortly thereafter, “OpsDev” was on many of our minds. I believe the earliest mention of OpsDev was 2012 [Randy Clark in UK Business Computing World, “DevOps or OpsDev?”]. Please forgive me if you made an earlier mention!

Why the Name Debate?

There are a few reasons why the name should have been OpsDev.

• The [obvious] effort mostly lives on the operations side.
• The business value and revenue is largely in operations.
• Operations is user facing and carries the branding importance.

Some other early mentions of a name change include:

• Apr 2013 “Ops Dev is not Dev Ops”
• Aug 2015 “Dev Ops, Ops Dev or a bit of both?”
• Oct 2015 “Dev Ops requires Ops Dev“
• Oct 2015 “Dev Ops Must Also Mean Ops Dev“
• Nov 2015 “Ops Dev – The new Truth of Agile Development“
• Jul 2016 “Ops Dev is Coming“

A Two Sided Coin

Loosely, DevOps is “driving Ops action with Dev concern” and the sister activity is “driving Dev action with Ops concern.”

DevOps refers to both halves.

Twitter has vibrant/valuable threads under both #DevOps and #OpsDev. Both sides are individually important and implementing one side without the other has value, but the two halves remain intertwined.

Practitioners are seeing that their DevOps initiatives will have far less value or even fail without the accompanying [OpsDev] sister activity. So even though the two sides may have been reversely named, they are part of the same thing. Chris Pietschamm, in “What Really is DevOps?“ correctly says DevOps is the responsibility of everyone.

DevOps includes OpsDev

Any DevOps exercise should consider both halves in a single effort.

Further, the body of knowledge has steadily increased under the DevOps banner. There are now degree programs with “DevOps” in their title. No degrees in “OpsDev.” The DevOps market size is predicted to be ~$13 billion by 2025 [Grand View Research in PR Newswire, “DevOps Market Size Worth”]. OpsDev market share $0.

Thus, the name debate is over. Anyway, as Geoff Rosenthal explains in “The Biggest Challenge in DevOps is…“, DevOps is an approach and a mindset. And somewhat unfortunately at least for a while, DevOps will remain “Dev-centric” – I challenge the reader to look at the current Wikipedia definition with an Ops eye.

I can see value if someone started a Wiki page for “OpsDev.” However, as long as “DevOps” remains the general term for the combined field of thought that has two sides. The name debate is done. Apologies to DBAs, sys admins, sustainment engineers and other fine operations folks, but “DevOps” is/has become the default moniker for the field at large.

For a long time, I resided down-under and I thought “south” might be the top edge of a world map, but the first cartographers were from the north and put themselves on top. Oh well.