Developers vs. Operations

I recently came across an interesting article (“Revisitingwhat is DevOps” by Carlos Sanchez) on role of DevOps and the constant balance between the developers and operations team within the project to make it successful. Throughout the article I could perfectly relate to what the essence of the article was i.e. the need to have a balance between both teams to achieve the best that the software/platform has to offer.

From my own personal experiences working on multiple projects, I have always felt the need to address as part of any project, setting up channels of communication and constant interaction between the developers/architects and the operations team. On too many occasions, the development team will come up with innovative and challenging approaches to only find out that the limitation to get it implemented is the hesitation/apprehension of the operations in setting up the infrastructure or service required to facilitate the approach. After many discussions and arguments, this would finally boil down to a stalemate with teams not making any ground and having to revert back to existing solution or platform to resolve the problem.

I am not saying that the problem here lies with the Operations. They have their own reservations (and rightly so) when implementing changes which could possibly hamper or disrupt services and make their lives a living hell just so that the development team can rejoice in their two minutes of fame. There are plenty of other constraints as well that the Operations team has to look at like lifecycle management and financial limitations when reviewing the changes.

However, that being said it is ultimately a working relationship between the two which can ultimately make or break a project.

For further reading and looking at Sharepoint Governance, I recommend Steve Goodyear’s books on Practical Sharepoint Governance and Sharepoint Enterprise Content Management.