Agile Infrastructure-What?

Agile is a very commonly used word in the world of software development. It has helped organisations drive better revenue through faster development, accomplish accuracy and achieve better time to market. However, whether it can do the same for the world of IT infrastructure is still an ongoing debate among the stakeholders of the industry.

While there are people who comment that there is no such things as agile infrastructure considering the cons that it bring along in the phase of implementation or analyzing its failure in some conservative domains like military and medical, there are others who believe that there are certainly some important gaps that agility can fill in the system of IT infrastructure, which would provide more power and faster capability to an organization.

Agile is a mindset, organisations have to be open for change, ready for continuous delivery, continuous improvement, early failing, incremental development, ready to learn through failures and believe that small values add superior slices to the entire project. An agile IT infrastructure enabled with cloud computing and latest models have the potential to drive new business value, reduce cost and time to market and opens new avenues of sustainable growth in the future for an enterprise. Read More.

Why the need for Agile Infrastructure

• Faster Deployment: Unlike the traditional way of project management, where a sign-off on the project was only given when the project was nearly complete, agile methodology starts rolling out the end product to the end user, stage by stage as and when it is ready. Thus achieving faster deployment and continuous delivery, feedback and improvement.

• Increased Flexibility: IT infrastructure is known for its conservative behavior when it comes to change. With Agile Infrastructure, organisations get room to makes changes and amendments as and when required, anytime during the project tenure or even after it is over.

• Continuous Feedback: In the traditional ways of project management, feedbacks use to roll in only after the project was rolled out, this would take months and years to shape up a project to perfection. In fact, the feedbacks used to come so late that the system had no more space to make any improvements, thus making it a very rigid and time taking process. With Agile Infrastructure, the implementation team is provided with feedbacks from the end user during the project tenure which is very valuable in shaping the final product to perfection.

• Continuous Improvement: The faster Deployments in the method of agile infrastructure allows the end user to use and review the product in phases, thus they feed the implementation team with continuous feedback, which allows the team to improve the product so that it meet the need of the end user.

Limitations of Agile Infrastructure

• It is a tedious task to estimate efforts for bigger and complex projects right at the beginning of the implementation.

• Smaller release cycles may not be a very successful procedure while implementing an infrastructure solution as it still deals with physical hardware and connections.

• Agile method pays less importance to design and documentation as everything happens on a real time basis.

• Infrastructure projects are very complicated involving both hardware and software. There can be situations where limited changes can be done to the hardware, thus making it difficult to start over again even if required.

• The clients are not always very clear about the final product that they expect out of the exercise, which becomes a hindrance in the path of agility of the project.

• Agile works best in an experienced environment. To make sure of agile infrastructure one has to find experienced resources for the project, which is not always possible.

Find out More on Happiest Minds’ Agile Infrastructure Services.