| | 19 APRIL 2022CIO INSIGHTSBy Michael Deutsch, CIO, CISO, Associate Commissioner, NYC Department of Youth & Community DevelopmentCongratulations, your IT team has started delivering on its promises and is now seen as a strategic partner with your business. What happens now? The business starts to send more requests your way, new projects, enhancements, features, solutions, strategies, ideas, etc. You hear things like `We need a new system that,' `We need a solution for this,' `Talk with those guys and figure something out.' Now the bottlenecks start appearing, you start missing deadlines because you are not able to release fast enough without introducing more defects or cutting corners on security and by the way, here come a constant flow of tickets that you need to keep up with because of all the new product releases. The curse of the trusted IT team. As Chief Information Officer at the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), I faced similar problems. We worked hard to build trust and become a strategic partner for the agency, our portfolios grew but the workforce started to become over burdened, our release dates started slipping, but the requests didn't stop coming. Despite all this, we kept in mind one clear objective, `do not fall back, only forward'. Learning from past quagmires, we focused on identifying force multipliers to use our existing workforce to be more efficient and effective. Step 1: Learn new ways to workWe began by identifying staff that had the potential to look outside the box, can be self-starters, and had the ability to learn and bring those ideas back to the team. They came back with ideas and thus began our DevOps journey, by introducing principles of eliminating waste and automation. Our stated DevOps goal `is to continuously improve our internal processes to achieve great results and have raving fans!' There was no going back, only forward.Step 2: Identify wasteWe ran exercises using Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to determine where we had the most waste within our processes, and which areas would have the most return on investment (that is keeping our customers happy). The release process was identified as having a huge amount of waste, as it required multiple teams to coordinate effectively and senior developers and admins to make the changes manually. We found that we were spending days on just moving our solutions and data from one environment to the next. Due to security concerns and to reduce risk there were only a handful of senior staff that were entrusted with the release and change tasks which not only caused bottlenecks of their time, but it removed HOW TO CREATE RAVING FANS USING DEVOPS AND CLOUD
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