Agile Infrastructure Boot Camp
In the quest for end-to-end value and the rise of infrastructure-as-a-service, agile practices are increasingly applicable to traditional hardware roles. Downstream operations also sorely need the political cover and WiP techniques promoted by agility.
You can’t talk about Agile infrastructure without talking about DevOps – the professional movement which is both a reaction to and an expansion of Agile success in software engineering. As agility increases speed and quality with which development teams produce features and products, it creates challenges for other departments tasked with deploying and maintaining them. DevOps and agile transformations are the keys to bridging these organizational gaps, bringing agility to areas of IT beyond the development shop, and resolving bottlenecks and handoff challenges in the downstream technology value chain.
In this Agile Infrastructure Course, You Will Learn How to:
- Adopt agile practices for working with traditional IT hardware
- Establish literacy with how agile practices apply to non-technology work
- Apply agile methods for managing infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud services
- Learn how agility can be adapted to work with networks, databases, routers, and other operational infrastructure
- Better integrate upstream technology project work with downstream dependencies
- Better manage work-in-process (WIP) through techniques like Kanban and WiP limits
- Better processes for managing planned vs. unplanned work
- Adopt agile practices for better avoiding emergencies and heroics
- Learn what has worked well in other organizations
IT operations professionals that work with infrastructure, hardware and/or IT services looking to adopt Agile principles.
Course Outline
Part 1: The Case for Agility and DevOps
- The heritage of Agile and DevOps
- The business case for DevOps
- Common Agile DevOps principles
- Goals of Agile DevOps
- Understanding the overall value chain
Exercise: Defining your goals
Part 2: Critical Principles of Agile & Scrum
- Effective and quick response to change
- Feedback loops
- Adaptation of work
- Cross-functional roles
- Continuous Integration
- Timeboxing
- Velocity tracking
- Linking work to end value
- Mindset and culture
Exercise: Assessing cultural profile
Part 3: Agile Infrastructure
- Iterating operational work
- Scrum in operational work
- Unified IT retrospectives
- Designing infrastructure goals
- Matching infrastructure to application goals
- Cloud engineering benefits
- Reducing skills-based silos
- Tools for implementing agile infrastructure
Part 4: Sprints - Agile Practices Applied
- Planning
- Vision
- Roadmaps
- Running a sprint
- Maintaining a backlog
- Grooming a backlog
- Retrospectives
- Velocity and velocity tracking
- Stakeholder roles
Exercise: An operational sprint simulation
Part 5: Managing Work in Process (WIP)
- Planned vs. Unplanned work
- The danger of heroics
- Queuing and slack
- Prioritization heuristics
- Preparing for and avoiding emergencies
Exercise: Understanding value streams and WiP
Part 6: Kanban - Tracking Operational and IT Service Work
- The Kanban system
- Kanban roots: gaining perspective
- Visualizing work
- Push vs. pull stimulus
- Lean principles
- Upper and lower work limits
- Queues and buffers
- Bottlenecks
- Blocked Work
Part 7: Waste and Application of Lean Principles
- Overproduction
- Work in Progress (WIP)
- Overburdening of teams
- Time available (idle states or waiting)
- Processing
- Inventory, stock, unused assets
- Handoffs and movement of work
- Defects
- Latent skill
Exercise: Identifying waste
Part 8: Scalability
- Linking business value to operational work
- Scaled Agile principles for increased capacity
- Automation and scaled infrastructure
- Prioritization
- Throttling operational work
- Dissolving operational silos
Part 9: Going Back to Work with a Plan
- Identifying your goals
- Next steps
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