Why is it that when we purchase a lotto ticket, every part of our brain tells us we won’t win, yet some portion of it is able to inspire hope where there shouldn’t be any? Could it be the same part of our brain that inspires hope in the face of nearly certain failure has been nurtured by the software development projects we have been exposed to over the years?
It would appear that the ability to prognosticate has been the foundation of nearly every waterfall project that had a timeline of three years or longer. It is this myth of “certainty” that agile methods are designed to eliminate. In our new approach, we simply break down and digest the scope of work until it is small enough for our risk tolerance, and easy enough to implement in our abbreviated time horizons. We try, we evaluate and we try again.
But no matter how low we believe the risk to be (and generally the reward we expect from it), risk does remain. And now instead of a three-year project plan well-equipped with milestones, corrective actions and projected costs, agile gives us only the current sprint, based loosely on our historical velocity and a literal “addiction” to continue this process going forward without any real regard for a predictable end-point or total project cost. Continuous delivery infers continuous innovation (emphasis on the word “continuous”). And if done right, why would a business ever choose to end innovation that works?
Imagine the analogy of Mozart sitting down to compose a quick advertising ditty that your company could play as background music on its website. Mozart begins with a few bars, and notices a theme that is worthy of far more exploration … so he does. He continues exploring this until an epic symphony emerges. This was not the plan and does not meet the original requirements. This could be considered scope-creep in the waterfall world, and thus a failure, as no one stares blankly at a website for the 30 minutes it takes to hear an entire Mozart epic … or do they?
Every audience grasps the concept of background music we pay little attention to but subconsciously understand it improves our experience. But nearly every audience also realizes the beauty of a Mozart epic, and would gladly buy CDs, MP3s or concert tickets to hear one of those over and over again, relishing every note. The question this analogy begs is simply this: Would Mozart’s employer—more specifically, his development manager—have been free to fund this “failure” or not? What happens when a project changes direction significantly away from the first vision we had of it? Does DevOps enable us to pursue this radical change in direction, or are our legacy financial systems and methods binding us to a waterfall delivery and reporting structure—and, in so doing, limiting what we will ever be able to accomplish through radical innovation?
The beauty of agile construction and DevOps delivery is that we may deliver “unexpected” innovation. Nearly every time a user “sees” what we have delivered to meet their need, they immediately think of “x” more things we could do to make it even better. This may result in taking a project in a radically different direction within the confines of a single financial year. To further enable our ability to do this, our legacy financial funding and reporting systems must evolve to match this demand. Our new risk profile must include the ability to fund failure on purpose, understanding that failure itself is part of the maturation process of innovation, not the death-knell of the company.
A more honest approach to funding agile/DevOps efforts would be to determine the annual investment the organization wants to make in certain capabilities, and innovations it expects to see in each thematic area. Overarching themes are funded on an annualized basis; however, great autonomy is granted and expected within the themes to ensure delivery is achieved. Pushing financial responsibility down in the organization to as low a level as possible has the effect of pairing the team leaders with the costs of what they do. Spending too much time on delivery of any given feature or function may cause the team to re-evaluate the approach and propose a better solution. This is more unlikely when budget responsibility is managed several levels above the team doing the work—in that instance, the budget resembles more of an infinite resource they need not be concerned with, until it is too late.
When proponents of DevOps claim it is changing the culture of a company, they are not limiting this view only to IT. Tertiary services in a company, such as the supporting financial budgeting systems, hiring systems and even contract management systems, may require significant change to match the pace of delivery and innovation DevOps delivers. As an enterprise looks to implement DevOps, it should look broadly at what else may be required to fully enable the pace of innovation it is capable of.
To continue the conversation, feel free to contact me.
Marshall Wells, Managing Director, Hybrid Cloud
Miha Kralj, Managing Director, IT Strategy and Cloud Computing Transformation 
Michael is the head of DevOps at Solovis, creator of 
Multi-Speed IT
Innovation vs. Optimization