Agile for Infrastructure

September 28, 2022
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Industry Trends
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GCSIT Staff
Agile for infrastructure projects empowers teams with the flexibility and control necessary to achieve superior outcomes. GCSIT specializes in agile for infrastructure support for businesses across industries.

Agile for Infrastructure: How Agile Methodologies Benefit Infrastructure Projects

Businesses and information technology professionals are under pressure to respond quickly to the ever-changing customer expectations and operating environments. Here are some factors driving tech change:

  • Analytics
  • Automation
  • Digitization
  • Globalization

One factor that accelerated change was the global pandemic; a massive health crisis showed up and broke through the operational status quo while hastening virtually every organization's digitization journey. Consequently, organizations that had formerly failed to adopt remote working, cloud computing, apps, and social media were forced to either make the leap or fade into obscurity when the sudden viral threat manifested.

A quick and effective response to market changes is a difficult but essential task in the ever-evolving world of information technology.

In response to the constantly shifting demands of the marketplace, IT capabilities change, and it may become necessary to reconfigure or completely replace organizational structures, processes, or systems. However, the underlying desire for control and predictability lingers, causing reluctance to embrace all changes.

IT agility is one of the most common ways businesses can successfully achieve all of these goals. Employing agile for infrastructure projects gives yourself greater flexibility when the project contains more unknowns than knowns.

Why agile for infrastructure projects?

Agile business practices refer to how quickly an organization responds to new opportunities. As a general principle, it is defined as when an organization becomes aware of a potential business opportunity and when it takes action.

Agile infrastructure principles

Agile can refer to a few common principles, including:

  1. Ensure customer satisfaction by delivering early and continuously
  2. Continual updates on a bi-monthly or more frequent basis
  3. Promote an environment of change
  4. Emphasize technical proficiency and superior engineering
  5. Foster effective communication between users and developers
  6. Focus on simplicity
  7. Continue to analyze your performance and what can be improved

It is important to avoid using IT agility in a manner that is detrimental to business outcomes and value. By fragmenting workflows, we can create other obstacles resulting in frustration and inconsistency, cost overruns, high technical debt, and, most importantly, unsatisfied clients.

Additionally, it is sometimes possible to sacrifice quality for speed. An integrated approach that incorporates both corporate objectives and customer needs is more sensible.

How can you improve IT agility?

IT agility is not a minor undertaking that can be accomplished in a few hours; it requires a complete restructuring of the company's values and thinking.

As soon as all stakeholders are engaged, an evolving strategy should be implemented to determine short- and long-term goals. When you have a clear vision of how you want your technology to function, it makes selecting the right opportunities that will get you there much easier.

To begin this process, the business must first pinpoint some of the critical elements driving its adoption of agility:

  • How flexible are existing systems, and will they be change-resistant?
  • Are implementation timelines limited as a result of testing protocols and rigid integration strategies?

Knowing what motivates the change will help to make goals more relevant and focused.

A complete overhaul of the system will likely be required to make the structure more agile. However, simplicity should never be overlooked.

Repurposing well-designed components and systems will be a quick and consistent way to cover various problem spaces. A rigid IT infrastructure, however, will always be a struggle. The digital age cannot wait for the traditional way to acquire and provision the underlying components that power software.

Transitioning to the cloud and infrastructure automation can help equip developers with the flexibility and ease-of-use capability they need to get the infrastructure they need when they need it.

All organizational transformations are driven by human needs. The agility of your infrastructure is no different.

At GCSIT, we deliver the solutions and resources businesses need to make their IT systems work for them. To learn more about how agile for infrastructure automation strategies could benefit your operations, please download our whitepaper.

To discuss agile for infrastructure projects for your business, please contact our representative.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko fromPexels

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