DevOps and agile methodologies certainly have shifted the priorities and practices of technology teams. Now, as organizations prepare for the post-Covid boom in activity ahead, these efforts will need to be at the forefront of cultural change and engaging customers. DevOps and agile need to break out of the IT department and become everyone's best practices. The role of IT professionals and managers in the year ahead will be to apply their learnings and educate and demonstrate the power of these philosophies to the rest of the enterprise.
There's no question that DevOps and agile are everywhere now, at least within the IT world. As discussed on our previous post[1], 74% of organizations now report having an active DevOps program, up from 47% five years ago -- and the Covid crisis of 2020 only put an exclamation point on these efforts. Agile is more widespread, with the most recent data[2] showing 95% of organizations practice agile development methods. However, only 33% report that more than half of their teams are actually practicing agile principles.
Agile practices may have been what pulled many enterprises through the Covid crisis, as the great corporate dispersal took place. "Just look at how quickly many could adapt to the new situation when the pandemic struck," says says Johan Karlsson, senior consultant at Perforce[3]. "It was mind-blowing how even very large enterprises could switch to being fully distributed in a very short time. That is one example where already implemented agile improvements became extra valuable."
As we move toward into the next era, a lot of what goes forward with both DevOps and agile is about having the proper mindset. DevOps, for one, "is a movement that refuses to be defined," says