Dev and Ops

My company's CIO recently came out with an interesting idea.

Before that, let me briefly explain the background for this.

In an organization where the core business is non-IT, the IT department usually gets vendors to help implement an IT solution or product and the vendors should do a KT to the IT department staff so that the IT department staff is able to help maintain the solution or product.

Maintenance usually means :

1) To make sure the solution or product is working well 24x7. If things go wrong, usually it is due to environment issues. For e.g. an version upgrade of one of the products that is also part of the whole solution. Sometimes it could be due to mistakes as the current solution does not read data properly under certain scenarios.

2) To enhance the product or solution to provide more values to the users. Most of the time the values means to save cost for performing one transaction. What kind of cost to save? Maybe to reduce the number of steps for the users to perform a transaction; or maybe to remove some of the manual processes such as "verify data in excel by eyes" thus avoid human error. 

Usually enhancement comes in the form of Change Request. Change Request is very common term used in the IT department of all organizations.

If it is something bigger than a "product/solution enhancement", usually such requirement will be turned into a Project. So the management or PMO will set up a project team for this.

The members of the project shall consist of Project Managers, Solution Architects, Business Analysts, and Developers, and sometimes Testers too.

Every project must be reviewed by Enterprise Architects. According to TOGAF framework, Enterprise Architects should govern the IT architecture of one organization. The value of Enterprise Architect is usually to create "Business Services" to perform certain "Business Processes", and after that the EAs have to define Information Services for each Business Service.

Anyway, my company does not have a EA team right now. As far as I know the management are working on it. When will these come into reality, I don't know.

Let's get back to Project. The problem now is there are so many issues happened to a recent project despite all the proper planning. So CIO and his team decided that:

1) To create a DEV division and a OPS division in one IT team. Take the Middleware team as the example, Middleware has one lead at the moment. In the future there will be a lead for DEV and a lead for OPS. Some developers will be parked under DEV, some developers will be parked under OPS. DEV will need to be held accountable for Project, and OPS will be held accountable for OPS.

This arrangement is not a fixed thing for developers so one developer can jump freely from DEV or OPS and vice versa at anytime.

This arrangement only matters most to the top management so that it is easier for them to check for status with the right person, in this case the lead. If some issues happened in project, look for DEV lead. If something screwed up in operation, look for OPS lead. This is how it works. Top management don't really care if the developer is in DEV or OPS.