In a bid to streamline the content development process, they addressed team challenges, such as being asked to support new projects, competing priorities and bottlenecks and silos, but in an agile fashion.

According to Milcetich, working in agile allows resources to be shifted, whatever the users need. “If it’s tax season and we need to make major updates to our tax content, we can now more easily pull anyone from the team to support that effort. We’re able to balance resources to match priorities and work in a more proactive, rather than reactive, manner,” she added.

Culture change

In this case, switching to agile implies grooming backlog requests, holding bi-weekly sprint planning meetings and retrospectives and using a board to track work in progress.

“It was a big change in the way we work. Our previous model had been based on a newsroom-style operation where people were clustered together around specific areas of content to use the journalism terminology,” admitted Milcetich.

“The newsroom model works really well for media outlets with bigger teams of people, but for a small government content team, it wasn’t the best fit because it didn’t easily allow people to support projects or user needs not on their beat.”

In order to keep things moving, employees regularly communicate about the status of work and roadblocks.

“While our process isn’t perfect, and we’re certainly still learning as we go, operating in a more agile manner has helped us focus our priorities and deliver content that will help our users accomplish their tasks,” said Milcetich.

Written from blog post by Leah Alger

The post Agile influences the USAGov appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Getting ready for DevOps

Keith Watson, Agile Delivery Manager at Ordnance Survey, will be a speaker at this year’s National DevOps Conference. He will be presenting on: ‘Chance Favours The Prepared Mind – Getting Ready For DevOps.’

When discussing his upcoming talk, Watson says, “I’ll be mentioning some hints and tips on implementing DevOps based on our experience at Ordnance Survey. In particular, how to make the first steps on the DevOps journey, how to present a compelling business case to convince stakeholders to invest in ideas and how to work with the politics of an organisation.”

He continues, “I’ll be using specific real world examples from what we’ve achieved at Ordnance Survey over the past three years.”

Keith Watson, Agile Delivery Manager, Ordnance Survey, will be presenting on: ‘Chance Favours The Prepared Mind – Getting Ready For DevOps’ at The National DevOps Conference.

Key takeaways from the presentation

“Get to know your stakeholders, in particular, the people who will use the service that you’re providing and those who approve project funding,” said Watson when asked about what he would like attendees to take away from his talk. In terms of incorporating DevOps into your organisation, Watson said, “often people think they need approval for a big project, but my advice is to just get started because you will learn as you go.”

The presentation will also take attendees through the type of people you need on your team; how to grow the capability of your team and how important it is to demonstrate regular progress to create positive stories to overcome objections.

Why is DevOps important to incorporate within organisations?

The culture and methods of DevOps is being adopted by many organisations because they are demonstrating real business value by saving time, increasing productivity and improving speed to market of new ideas.

Discussing why DevOps should be integral to an organisation, Watson said “because of the need to have specialist skills in an IT organisation to deliver software, barriers between development and operations can build up very easily. The way to develop modern software is by having these teams work together. You can achieve this using a combination of culture change, business transformation and DevOps automation philosophy.”

Why attend The National DevOps Conference?

The National DevOps Conference provides an ideal environment for learning, networking and developing skills.

Watson spoke on why people should attend industry conferences surrounding niche topics, such as DevOps, and said: “If you’ve started DevOps and stalled a bit or are struggling to start, then you should attend.”

He went on to finally say, “some of my stories might resonate and [you] might come away with ideas on how to move DevOps forward in your organisation.”

Written by Jordan Platt

The post Learning DevOps success from the Ordnance Survey at The National DevOps Conference appeared first on DevOps Online North America.