Removing the Silos: When Agile, Lean, and DevOps Aren’t Enough

Your organization has adopted some combination of agile, lean, and DevOps practices, yet you have a sinking feeling that it’s not working the way everyone hoped it would. You’re wondering if it’s because you work for a very large organization and all this talk about small, cross-functional teams seems to conflict with your organizational charts. Your IT department is organized around functional disciplines such as the PMO, business analysis, Test Center of Excellence, and DevOps engineering. Do we need to blow up these structures in order to have successful agile/lean/DevOps transformations? Betty Zakheim says no. The trick is to remove the barriers to effective teamwork that these functional silos create. To understand where the barriers exist, Betty uses a combination of value stream mapping and an examination of the tools and techniques the functional disciplines employ. Using these techniques, she locates the inefficiencies in the handoffs among disciplines and introduces cross-lifecycle metrics that provide a better understanding of how effective your SDLC really is.