This document discusses mapping project-based work to DevOps-style continuous workflows. It covers the history of agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery practices. It also discusses common challenges organizations face, including separating development teams from operations teams. Large, complex projects are difficult to execute in small batches. The document proposes that project managers be responsible for overall value flow, communicating the cost of delays, and ensuring technical work meets business needs by coordinating between teams. Project work may need to be "projectized" to address bottlenecks before moving to a more continuous model.

1. Chris Knotts, PMP – Product Director, IT Innovation & Learning
Mapping “Projectized” Work to DevOps-style Workflows

2. Thank you for having me!
We will discuss…
• A bit about the state of Agile, DevOps, and continuous
workflows (integration, testing, delivery, operations, etc.)
• A bit of history
• Project management concerns
• Common organizational dynamics that leave us with
plenty of work to do

3. A few assumptions for the hour…
• Chris is a real project manager, but not a real engineer
• DevOps, and to a lesser degree Continuous Delivery, are not
codified. They are loose, open families of principles and
practices enabled by a wide range of tech assets and tools.
• For now, specific vocabulary doesn’t matter. We’re
interested in principles.
• We’re asking hard questions that don’t always have obvious
answers – but the answers are there.

4. Revisiting Triple Constraints
Scope
Time Cost
Quality

5. Jim Highsmith, Thoughtworks

6. From traditional to the “Agile Triangle”
Source: Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management (2nd Edition)
Scope
Time Cost
Quality
Value
Quality Constraints
Scope
Time Cost
Source of value to
the customer
These are
enablers

7. Projects, or software projects?

8. The agile manifesto’s principles lead with…
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery of
valuable software.

9. A simplified look at a typical enterprise
s
S e c u r I t y, G o v e r n a n c e S e c u r I t y, G o v e r n a n c e
Business Customer
Application
Development teams
IT Operations, Production
Environments, Support
Change Management

10. A simplified look at enterprise IT projects
Business
analysis
App Dev
Testing
& QA
Release IT Ops
Idea or
need
Delivery
Feedback?

11. Application delivery and the cost of defects
50% of defects introduced here

12. 2011: Continuous Delivery:
Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, &
Deployment Automation
Jez Humble
Dave Farley

13. 2013: The Phoenix Project:
A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Gene Kim
George
Spafford
Kevin Behr

14. These business
outcomes are
why people get
so excited
about DevOps

15. How does a continuous delivery practice work?
• Configuration management (i.e. Puppet, Chef, Ansible)
• Distributed version control (i.e. Git, Mercurial)
• Highly automated testing, deployment pipelines
• Equal priority to non-functional and functional
requirements
• Cross functional teams & agile engineering

16. From waterfall, to agile, to continuous flow
Waterfall
Agile
Continuous Delivery

17. BUT…
• Projects have a start and a finish – they are not
continuous.
• How can large, complex projects be executed if
we only work in tiny little bits?
These are fundamental scalability problems.

18. Jez Humble’s “Water-scrum-fall”
Study, approval Design, planning
Analysis
Development
Testing, showcase
iterations
Centralized QA
Release,
operations
“Agile” teams
PMO,
Finance
Downstream IT
The “fuzzy front end”
Projectlifecycles

19. Enterprise projects need our help!
• Projects don’t keep up with needs
• Functional batching causes slowness and waste
• Massive security problems
• Attaching monetary value to conceptual value
• Who is responsible for the overall flow?
• Inefficiencies of estimating and planning
• Cost of delay

20. Business
analysis
App Dev
Testing
& QA
Release IT Ops
Agile
Continuous Delivery
DevOps
Flow of enterprise value: are we there yet?
Project life cycles

21. Who is in a position to improve this paradigm?

22. So… who is the project manager?
• A product owner?
• A scrummaster?
• Someone worried about their job?

23. Don Reinersten
“If you only quantify
one thing, quantify the
cost of delay.”

24. Maersk Line and using cost of delay, CD3 scores
Joshua Arnold,
“Black Swan Farming”
http://blackswanfarming.com/experience-report-maersk-line/

25. Value flow from first mile (fuzzy front end) to
last mile (delivery)
• Bernoulli’s principle (and other fluid dynamics)
can be applied to enterprise projects
• Lean principles are being retooled for software
projects
• Projectize work to attack bottlenecks, waste,
and cultural barriers, then figure out the rest

26. So… who is the project manager?
• Responsible for a value-based outcome
• Responsible for communicating monetary value of time cycles
• Responsible for framing projects and managing results
• Responsible for making sure technology work is actually
responding to real business needs.
• Coordinator and communicator-in-chief between business
stakeholders and technical producers
• Responsible for making work status visible to stakeholders

27. Chris Knotts, PMP – Product Director, IT Innovation & Learning
Thank you!
cknotts@aspeinc.com @chris_knotts