Leveraging Plutora to Accelerate Business Initiatives and Projects
Organizations implementing a DevOps culture need to anticipate the convergence of Agile and waterfall development methodologies.
Companies moving toward DevOps understand that their processes and IT landscape will be almost assuredly bimodal. That is, there are two silos in the IT organization – Mode 1 is focused on the legacy applications that support the backbone of an organization and Mode 2 is focused on more aggressive Agile releases.
Organizations implementing a DevOps culture need to anticipate the convergence of Agile projects with the waterfall development methodology associated with legacy systems. It’s challenging to manage dependencies related to different schedules, limited resources, and diverse project portfolios. With so much to look out for, spreadsheets can’t support the speed and complexity of enterprise releases.
In order to deliver bimodal projects successfully, you need a single view of release activity and dependencies. As Plutora is process independent, it provides a configurable framework in which to support disparate processes. In fact, Plutora provides the enterprise visibility and transparency necessary to allow identification of process gaps which need to be addressed.
Agile vs Waterfall: Plutora Accelerates Bimodal Delivery
Working with our customers, we have identified various weak spots in traditional processes and team handoffs that adversely affect speed and quality of delivery. The Plutora platform provides the necessary transparency that has enabled them to standardize processes and drive measurable results. By managing these release-critical activities, Plutora customers have standardized and automated:
Gates and governance. By clarifying the rules for different Modes, Agile releases with low dependency and no regulatory constraints can be released quickly, while more complex releases can get the necessary due diligence.
Release timelines. While independent releases are easily managed by a project manager, multi-application systems spanning multiple teams and cadences require more coordination to avoid errors and delays.
Dependencies and impacts. For enterprise releases, it is essential to establish and communicate all dependencies so that appropriate checks and testing are applied - for example, recognizing regulatory constraints inherited by connection to controlled systems.
Environment allocation and configuration. Test environments are critical, but expensive resources. Balancing availability and utilization maximizes throughput while minimizing cost.
Resolution of release and system collisions. Recognizing the critical nature of system configuration and test data ensures valid testing can be completed correctly the first time.
An effective Enterprise Release Management function gives visibility into the release process and allows managers to make informed decisions by identifying and resolving potential problems well before they become disruptive.
Conclusion
The opportunity presented by DevOps is clear. The trick is to balance the disparate goals of Mode 1 (stability) and Mode 2 (agility). Visibility and control are required to manage multiple dependent releases consistently and reliably. Doing so manually is time-intensive and error-prone. Plutora’s platform provides the aggregation, collaboration, and automation that allows management of initiatives and projects to accelerate value delivered to the business.
Enterprise Release Management (ERM) is critical to the success in understanding the characteristics of any software release to ensure high quality deployment to production. An effective ERM function gives visibility into the release process and allows managers to make informed decisions by identifying and resolving potential problems well before they become disruptive.
