I’ve done a lot of reading lately, and collaborating, specifically about the DevOps movement, agile service management and SCRUM.  So what do these things have in common – teamwork and collaboration.

• DevOps is defined by Gene Kim as “the emerging professional movement that advocates a collaborative working relationship between Development and IT Operations, resulting in the fast flow of planned work (i.e., high deploy rates), while simultaneously increasing the reliability, stability, resilience and security of the production environment.”
• “SCRUM is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex software projects.” (SCRUM.org)  SCRUM leverages a release planning meeting, a sprint planning meeting, a daily scrum, a sprint review and a sprint retrospective . . . wow, that’s a lot of meetings.
• “Agile Service Management (Agile SM) ensures that ITSM processes reflect Agile values and are designed with “just enough” control and structure in order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that facilitate customer outcomes when and how they are needed.” (ITSM Professor)   Agile SM leverages similar events as SCRUM with the exception of leveraging a product backlog which is replaced by the process backlog.

So why the focus on teamwork and collaboration?  Are we particularly bad at teamwork and collaboration in IT?  Perhaps it could be partially attributed to the fact that some IT professionals work in IT because they like to work with ‘things’ as opposed to ‘people’.  When I was in high school, we took some tests to determine if we would be more successful working with things or with people.  For those who had an aptitude towards things, computer programming was a suggested career direction.  So maybe it stands to reason that communicating isn’t always a natural skill for some IT professionals.  However, it is becoming more and more apparent it is a vital part of the skill-set for IT professionals.  As IT continues focusing on aligning with the business and ensuring positive contributions towards the value streams of the business, we better become better communicators and collaborators.

~ITSM Crusader