Is the future of Agile actually BizDevOps?

Source – searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com

It’s easy to think every organization has DevOps on the corporate brain but in reality, interest in — and commitment to — Agile remains high, particularly in the enterprise space. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to do. And it doesn’t mean DevOps isn’t having an impact.

With Agile2017 less than a month away I interviewed AgileCraft CEO Steve Elliott about the company’s 10X product release and the ongoing efforts enterprises are making to be more Agile/agile, in all senses of the word. Elliott’s seeing strong demand for a way to tie Agile efforts in to the business side, something the new 10X is designed to help with. But here’s what struck me as really interesting: in a weird way, what large enterprises are looking for sounds a lot like what some would call BizDevOps, or DevOps 2.0. It’s the idea that the business side, developers and operations are all working together with biz integrally involved in every step of the process up to and including setting the agenda.

Here’s how Elliott explains it: The key is to get developers to understand why they’re building the software they’re building (i.e., understand the business case) and to let the business side know, in a granular way, exactly what works about the software in design and production and what doesn’t. And then replicate that across 20 (or more) Agile teams. AgileCraft’s 10X is designed to tackle that problem from a technology side, but of course there’s the culture shift implied in all of this as well. “I still think the hardest thing for us to build and deliver on is the business agility piece,” he said. “The developers need to know the why, the context is important, and the business side needs to understand everything that’s going on with the technology. The companies that can bring those two sides together are the ones that are going to win.”

Elliott sees his product as a way to marry the speed of DevOps with Agile processes and ensure a communication flow from all sides. So whether it’s SAFe Agile, or BizDevOps, or digital transformation it’s another sign that enterprises are realizing things have to change.