6 Tips on How You Can Build a Next-gen Tech Operating Model

A recent report by Forrester titled “The Future of Technology Operations” talked about how, despite transitioning to new operating models, organizations have dodged several critical factors that are indispensable to the era they operate in. Building a coherent, next-gen technology operating model that’s fully compatible with Agile, DevOps, cloud-native, and digital transformation requires Infrastructure and Operations professionals to understand the entire range of interrelated concerns. Read on to uncover insights from this report.

Traditional Operating Models Can Not Keep Pace in Today’s Era

Despite traditional operating models having enjoyed immense popularity for several decades, in today’s digital era, they are quickly losing relevance. Not only are these models poorly integrated, but they also tend to cause widespread conflict, divides, and disagreements. Here are key reasons why traditional operating models cannot keep pace in today’s dynamic and competitive era:

• As the need to build a comprehensive and integrated organization strengthens, traditional hierarchical organizations divided by specialty lack the cohesiveness that the modern world demands. Teams that work in separate, siloed groups, with department-specific policies and practices end up solving their own small problems – instead of looking at the bigger picture.
• Rigid boundaries between development and operations teams are often the reason for poor communication and collaboration and this impacts development and delivery outcomes. Although the concept of DevOps is widely being adopted, organizations still struggle to successfully embrace its capabilities, causing delayed time-to-market.
• Project management continues to hold enormous importance, but there is a growing disinterest from digital and IT organizations in PMO and PMBOK. These organizations are more inclined towards having a product mindset, and are increasingly turning to processes like Kanban, Scrum, and SAFe.
• At the same time, process management techniques like lean and six sigma, although highly efficient, are not capable of meeting today’s requirements – especially as traditional boundaries are being broken and as the nature of digital product development becomes increasingly variable.
• The implementation of different governance mechanisms at different stages of development tends to delay delivery speed, which in today’s fast-paced environment is totally unacceptable. As competition intensifies and customers expect products and services to quickly meet their needs, frequent change approvals or security reviews are bound to impact speed and agility.

Building the Next-gen Tech Operating Model Requires Careful Precision and Planning

As the pace of technology innovation, market disruption, and customer expectation intensifies, organizations have a lot of work to do: they need to move away from functional specialization towards cross-functional teams, from phased deliveries to continuous deliveries, and from siloed department-specific techniques to enterprise-wide collaborative techniques. Here are some tips on how you can move away from your traditional operating model towards a next-gen tech operating model for long-term success and prosperity:

1. Bridge hierarchical boundaries, especially between development and operations teams, to shorten and quicken the feedback loop. This can not only ensure teams work together towards achieving common goals, but it also allows for faster and more efficient development and delivery of products and services.
2. Have a robust change management strategy in place to evolve your product as business and customer needs change. This is especially true in a world where software systems are getting increasingly complex. As new challenges and requirements constantly emerge, with a robust change strategy, you can keep up with the inherent variability of products.
3. Forego redundancy for the sake of autonomy, to empower teams with the resources they need to achieve their objectives. Finding the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness is critical to ensure teams are able to meet deadlines – without being restricted by access to technology.
4. Integrating continuous learning into the culture of your organization is also important to successfully respond to changing business needs instead of constantly reorganizing teams or projects to meet requirements. Focus on embedding resilience engineering into the DNA of your organization, hiring staff with learning and collaboration capabilities, and building high-performing, continuously learning, cross-functional teams to drive organizational agility and resilience.
5. Constantly monitor and measure value streams to accelerate the delivery of business objectives. Instead of just measuring low-level KPIs across different teams, make it a point to focus on high-level metrics such as customer satisfaction, net profit, and time-to-market for sustainable, long-term growth and success.
6. Automate governance to improve trust and credibility while saving substantial time and resources. Automation can not only ensure 24×7 compliance with current and upcoming regulations, but it can also empower teams to eliminate silos and make confident and precise decisions using data that is all-encompassing.

As the business landscape gets increasingly multi-faceted, organizations have to drive sustained efforts towards revamping their technology operating models. Relying on traditional models not only impact business growth, they also tend to impact market reputation as well as competitive standing. To drive long-term success, it is critical that organizations bridge hierarchical boundaries, work on their change management strategy, enable autonomy, embrace continuous learning, measure value streams, and automate governance to improve trust and credibility.