Three hour tour

Hi gurus, if you haven’t read The Phoenix Project yet I hope this tips you over the top. This book makes a tremendous contribution to the Agile/Lean/DevOps movements & articulates most of the challenges we’ve experienced in the world of technology.

You may have to Google “Gilligan’s Island” to understand the context of this, but the 1960s sitcom was based on the idea that a group of friends went on a “three-hour tour” and became shipwrecked on island where they figure out how to survive. I watched a few episodes, it’s hilarious!

The book nails it! How many developers have been given a “three-hour” task only to find months have passed with emails in limbo, deployments rolled-back due to unrelated problems, or worse!

If you haven’t discovered it yet, the newish term “DevOps” has identified the ultra-effective cohesion of development and operations into a single entity, a “vergence” if you will. Sometimes the vergence is concentrated around an individual but ideally it will be expressed as an entire team culture. The Agile Manifesto also captured this context in a slightly different fashion, both ultimately emphasizing rapid-fire release cycles in an chain-in-sprocket fashion, not because rapid-fire releases are in-and-of-themselves better, but because the rapid-fire nature ensures that the sprocket (development) and the chain (ops) are operating as one. When they are one, there’s nothing a team can’t do & additional benefits abound.

In the 21st century DevOps should be viewed as the drivetrain for an organization. There are very few industries that don’t rely heavily on technology, and relying on technology without reliable DevOps amounts to indentured servitude. An organization’s technology is the wind beneath the wings of the end services, regardless of what those are. If the wind is sporadic and unreliable the services will flounder. Many timely and viable business plans have failed solely due to the failure of this drivetrain. Leaving many very smart people with very excellent abilities waiting at the harbor for a tour that never returns. Like eagles with no air to soar upon.

If you’re looking for a provider that can consistently provide lift, contact us. The problem with even a 3-hour tour in today’s technology environment is that it costs much more than time & money. Especially during take-off! It can cost the entire launch. The cloud has provided an environment so agile that even a single early adopter of your vision can see your services grow with them, adapt to them, and be tailored such that they can count on you to keep them aloft. No matter what your service is, this is critical, be sure your DevOps can keep you (and them) aloft too.