In my last post, I talked about the Path to DevOps and the underlying Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) disciplines that need to be in place before the benefits of DevOps can be realised.

For most organisations, this transformation and the journey to DevOps will take time, generally months to years to become truly effective.  These are the orders of magnitude we’re talking about because fundamentally, the transformation process it is a cultural shift, and where people are involved, it takes more time.  Simply installing the tools won’t get you to where you need to be and without the correct discipline it may actually hinder, rather than help, your organisation’s ability to deliver.

This is an investment in people and technology that I highly recommend you make, but that doesn’t help you today.  Many organisations are under pressure to keep up with the market and the speed at which their competitors can move—you don’t have the luxury of time.

This is where a partner like Avanade can help since we are an agile organisation, and we’ve invested in the development of our people and our processes so that we can better serve our customers.  This applies to the delivery of software and infrastructure solutions, but it also goes beyond.

Because our managed service organisation works closely with our development teams, we can bring DevOps to you.  We build your solution and then operate it in an agile manner.  Our integrated development and operations teams help accelerate change through those applications and help you react faster to market change.  Avanade Managed Services brings these benefits without the necessity for you to transform your own IT organisation.

But we’d be remiss if we left it at that.  As I mentioned previously, to get the best out of DevOps, outsourced or not, you need to have an agile organisation, not just an IT team.  We can give you deep insight into application use, but you need to be able to process that information and to make investment decisions.  We can set up a continuous deployment system to deploy new functionality on a daily basis, but you need to provide the backlog and prioritise the features.

When we work with customers in this space we can also provide ALM Transformation and Agile Transformation services.

ALM Transformation assesses the current state within your organisation and provides a customized roadmap for improvement.  We recognise that this is a change program and, as such, we don’t just recommend tooling.  Our approach includes training and an incremental maturity model that allows teams to adapt at their own pace.

Avanade’s partnership with Scrum.org has enabled us to provide the very best Agile Transformation services to our customers.  We have over 1,200 certified individuals: the most certified agile trainers of any organisation in the world.  As you may imagine, an agile transformation from the developers up to the CEO can be a very personalized experience and each case is unique.

Trends and buzzwords can sometimes be nothing but hype, but in this case, the hype around DevOps has been beneficial.

The unbelievable scale that some agile organisations have achieved captures the imagination, and as the awareness of what is possible permeates the industry, many organisations are seeing how DevOps could benefit them.

DevOps touches everyone, from developers to business leaders and CEOs. Setting your sights on high-performance DevOps-enabled capabilities can act as a catalyst that will help drive change throughout your organisation.

This blog post is the final part of a 5-part series about DevOps by author David Jobling.

• Part 1: The Benefits of Nurturing a DevOps Culture
• Part 2: The Potential for DevOps to Accelerate Your Business
• Part 3: DevOps for Everyone
• Part 4: The Path to DevOps Success
• Part 5: An Agile Organisation as a DevOps Accelerator