How to Ensure Effective Governance in Ops-Enabled Full Stack Organizations

If somebody asks you what is the biggest challenge facing your software engineering team right now. I am sure the challenge of addressing consumer demands and expectations will be on the top of your list. With the competition getting more intense, “Faster, better and cheaper” is now the slogan of every outsourced software development company with a never-ending hunt to do more with less. Having shorter time to market strategy and being innovative enough has become mandatory to stay ahead in the business.

To address these challenges, we often see several software developers hired by these companies across various levels. In this blog, we will be discussing one such role i.e. Ops-Enabled Full Stack Developer, which is presently one of the most sought-after individuals by most software development companies. We will also touch upon some of the key pointers to maintain effective governance across the organizations with full stack Ops-enabled software engineers.

What do we mean by Ops-Enabled Full Stack Developer?

You can always see these people working across organizations as full-stack software developers (very well familiar with frontend and backend technologies) who are also proficient in application development and system operations. The way this role looks interesting from outside, the more complex it becomes when you try to understand the complications it holds to solve any real-life business problem. In order to maintain control in such a dynamic environment, it’s very important to ensure effective governance within your organization.

Let’s Understand Governance !

In simple words, governance is a process to check if the work done by a company is adding value to its strategic goals and visions. It involves the alignment of operations and security with productivity to ensure a company achieves its business goals. Clearly, this is essential whether you are dealing with any application development or manufacturing process. After all, there’s no level of agility that eliminates the need for clarity of direction and purpose.

Mentioned below are few of the common restraints in a dynamic development environment:

• Determining the shortest path to accomplish tasks like hardcoding credentials in code
• Cost management For e.g. choosing the best DevOps tool out there with an aim to get more with less
• Manual processes
• Knowledge transfer

Here are some quick tips to build effective governance for your organization:

• Always Follow Agile Methodology: To make an effective governance strategy, it’s very important to make small changes in your daily practice regularly. This will help you to proactively take the right measures at the outset to figure out the underlying issues that make your production releases risky rather than making things more complex resulting in greater delay.
• Distribution of Responsibilities: Distribution of governance responsibilities across empowered teams is a must have for any organization that is looking to build a scalable team for its future objectives. In order to support this, you also have to work on the automation part which surely makes things simpler, faster and flexible.
• Cost Management: As we discussed above, cost management is one of the very common challenges you can witness in any rapidly changing IT environment. This is also a key area that needs a serious attention to align all your governance practices. This will certainly be going to help you to identify all the potential users and the amount of money you are going to invest in them. This basic understanding will come in handy over the next few steps when you will finally define your real business objectives. For instance, there are thousands of businesses out there who are actively investing in several cloud migration services. For them, it does not make much sense to know about your investment level but to know what you are doing, how and why?
• Smooth Accessibility:  Now, that you know about your potential users, it’s time to figure out who in the business needs access to your services. Should they require passing any government regulations or compliance? Or they have full rights to spin up a new server workload on the fly? Or they need any approval from their manager?? The basic agenda here is to make your team flexible enough to be productive, without losing much control. To achieve this, you should revisit your past backlogs to see your business goals and use them to find the solution. Well, you can understand this thing as a simple closed-loop control system wherein a feedback loop is generated every time to give some part of the output to the reference or set point (contains the desired output) that enables you to compare the two values and determine the error between the system output and the desired output. Though this is a basic control system diagram and has nothing to do with the IT world, the problem statement and approach is very much similar which makes things easy to understand from every perspective.As per the complexity of your project, it’s highly recommended that you reach out to any service partner to work out any configuration nuances or accessibility issues in order to minimize the risk.

• Automation of Governance:  It’s simply not realistic to manually manage all your issues as you move up to your goals. Therefore, it’s important to deploy a variety of automation techniques within your governance practices. As an example, we have a number of instances where cloud workloads and administration can be automated to make your life simpler.

Conclusion: Thank you for taking your time out to read this blog. Governance is a big topic and therefore it was not possible for me to cover everything in a single blog post. However, I tried my level best to keep most of the things as simple as possible and cover some of the key practices followed by leading organizations.

Any Thoughts???

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