BizDevOps: The Evolution from Agile and DevOps

BizDevOps is an agile software development methodology that encourages greater communication and collaboration among business, development, and operations teams throughout the software development lifecycle. 

The philosophical shift towards DevOps demonstrated the wide-ranging value of combining operations and development teams. Creating a shared understanding of each team's objectives made it possible to expedite the deployment cycle of software with strategies like continuous delivery and continuous integration while simultaneously improving performance and user experience. 

BizDevOps takes this mindset of inclusivity a step further by incorporating business teams into the development process. BizDevSecOps is a similar philosophy that includes security teams in order to support more rapid deployments without sacrificing safety or risk mitigation. Both represent a holistic company-wide approach to achieving better business outcomes from IT efforts.

Encouraging communication and collaboration between teams throughout the software development lifecycle creates an environment that supports innovation, efficiency, and ultimately, benefits the bottom line in the form of a reduction of costs and a greater return of profits.

Implementing a successful BizDevOps strategy isn't just about breaking down organizational silos, it is also about collecting and sharing data that correlates IT efforts with end-user experience and its impact on business outcomes. Consider the following as you transition towards a BizDevOps methodology: 

Build your team

The best way to transition to a BizDevOps methodology is to identify key members of business, development, and operations teams to serve as leaders, and begin to create new process around communication methods and business practices to improve collaboration across the teams. Start with a small project to create familiarity with the new procedures and to discover which processes are helpful or are still in need of improvement.

Identifying key performance indicators and tracking relevant metrics helps serve as an objective source of truth. This can validate the effort involved with creating structural and procedural changes to your teams and stakeholders. The ability to quantify the effect of application performance on business outcomes can help prioritize projects and build momentum towards the goal of integrating your business, development, and operations teams into one cohesive unit.

Find the best tools

Last, but certainly not least, research and implement the tools necessary to facilitate this endeavor. From project planning and communication software to performance monitoring and metrics, having the right tools in place can be the defining factor of whether a BizDevOps plan succeeds or not.

AppDynamics offers a suite of products and monitoring solutions to help ensure that deployments are in alignment with your organization's business goals. Improve the visibility of your application and infrastructure and support your BizDevOps goals with the following functionality:  

• Analyze end-user behavior and learn from their actions with deep code-level end-to-end transaction tracing. 
• Reduce MTTR and improve user experience with AI/ML based automated anomaly detection, proactive alerting, and root cause analysis. 
• Automate time-consuming repetitive tasks and establish performance baselines to streamline DevOps processes .
• Build curated dashboards that correlate application performance to business health, making it easier to prioritize projects or to identify which areas of the application most heavily impact business.
• Identify, invest, and measure ROI on digital properties to optimize spending and validate development efforts.