BizDevOps Trending: Why DevOps Now Needs the Business

Why is bizdevops trending right now? Well, DevOps has been trending for over a decade. So there is nothing new in that sentiment. What is new, though, is the direction. DevOps has also started to trend toward a new goal. The goal is to let a firm's business teams work more closely with its product teams. BizDevOps is therefore made up of three words. Those words are Business plus Development plus Operation. Yes, it looks a little awkward. Still, it rolls off the tongue quite nicely (say it after me, beez-dev-opps).

What Is BizDevOps, And Why Is BizDevOps Trending

DevOps has helped a great deal to lift quality in software work. What it has lacked, however, is customer focus. DevOps by design looks inward. Customer focus is only an implied perk of shipping better software faster. Meanwhile the tech world keeps changing fast. DevOps is now a basic skill in almost every serious product team. So it no longer gives the edge it once did. We must therefore put customer focus at the front of all we do, or we shall fall behind.

A Lesson From My Own DevOps Experience

Let me give you an example from my own work. A decade ago, when DevOps was still young, I built a DevOps model for a global firm. I set up half a dozen teams. Each one ran its own DevOps mandate along a skill area: Salesforce, Tibco, SAP, and Data Analytics. Oh boy, we hit an amazing rate of new releases. The teams ran like well-oiled machines, and the work looked more like a factory than a software shop (LEAN folks, eat your heart out).

After a year, however, we saw a huge gap. The gap was business context. Each team ran its own mandate, so it slowly lost sight of why the work mattered. People built software widgets at great speed. Yet those widgets only came together at the point of join-up. The model worked fine while most members knew the business needs well. Trouble then surfaced, because staff churn left new joiners cut off from the customer. As a result, when teams lost the business context, we also lost sight of the very customer we served.

How BizDevOps Helps

Let's start with PMI's BizDevOps vision and break it down. Here, the business team acts as the voice of the customer. Your DevOps teams need not talk to the end customer at all. Instead, their voices get plumbed in to the wider loop. The term business operations covers every team that supports your customer. For example, it spans product, sales, service, finance, and the wider stakeholder groups.

Why BizDevOps Works

BizDevOps works because it folds the business into the DevOps loop. As a result, you can react to shifting customer needs far faster. The silos between business and tech teams also start to fade. We often reach for the phrase Design Thinking when fresh ideas run dry. Without too many cliches, let us just say this. BizDevOps is a down-to-earth way to bake the Design Thinking ethos into your DevOps. It works because the voice of the customer stays present in the teams who build and ship the product.

BizDevOps is taught in depth in our Disciplined Agile courses. PMI frames the same business, development, and operations alignment in its own agile and DevOps guidance. If you would like to look into it further, please contact me at [email protected].