Agile infrastructure teams collaborate with infrastructure and software to construct modern applications in an iterative, continuous process. This enables organizations to quickly release new digital products and services to customers while guaranteeing high-quality, secure, and scalable systems.
IT organizations are increasingly exploring how to incorporate Agile practices into their infrastructure departments. They hope these methods will enhance productivity, enable them to deliver faster software with greater efficiency, and reduce costs.
Successful Agile infrastructure teams require the skills and expertise to implement the appropriate infrastructure for each project. However, this can be challenging when teams must retool their systems to accommodate changes that come with an Agile development environment.
One IT department at a large financial services organization adopted an Agile methodology to boost efficiency and productivity. They were dissatisfied with their traditional infrastructure-building processes, which were delaying the release of digital products and services.
To address this problem, they implemented a series of Agile transformations that focused on automating and streamlining their infrastructure-building operations. After one year of launching their transformation program, they were able to significantly reduce infrastructure costs and boost productivity levels.
In addition to cutting operational costs and improving productivity, this company’s infrastructure transformation also enhanced collaboration between its application development and IT operations teams. As a result, developers were more aware of potential problems that could affect their applications’ dependability and stability.
They were more likely to rely on automated solutions for speedier application deployment, giving users access to their apps through self-service tools and streamlining IT operations. Conversely, traditional IT infrastructure engineers were generally unaware of the operational difficulties faced by application development teams and thus did little to assist them.
Once an infrastructure organization is ready to launch agile infrastructure teams, the members need to be trained, and the team charter created. A comprehensive charter will guarantee that everyone on the team understands its direction while aligning stakeholders with project goals. After this initial backlog has been constructed, governance should take place so progress toward these desired outcomes is monitored closely.
The next step must be to ensure the sustainability of infrastructure transformation. This requires updating objectives and priorities, refining career models to accommodate new roles, and making strategic planning more agile.
Many IT executives have discovered that they can boost their agility by revamping their budgeting and staffing models to be more adaptable. Doing so now could help prevent costly errors from occurring in the future.
They can also utilize agile tools to automate parts of their software development process and a hybrid cloud solution to seamlessly switch between private and public clouds, thus significantly reducing the cost associated with creating and deploying applications.
At this financial-services company, the infrastructure transformation was undertaken to create a more integrated working model between IT and application development. To this end, they implemented teams that were closely aligned with development teams and implemented highly automated infrastructure service offerings that reduced provisioning time from months to mere minutes. Furthermore, they established a change management board to guarantee all changes were approved prior to deployment on production environments.
