Software developers were the first to use the agile methodology for adaptive planning, earlier delivery and continual improvement. Since then, the word “agile” has spread throughout every industry.
For IT departments, staying agile is non-negotiable. As technology changes at a rapid pace, it is the onus of the IT department to keep up with the new risks, opportunities and best practices.
Agility is a Mindset
“The idea of being an agile organization is a mentality first and then the technology helps us get there,” said James Hillard, President of Hilly Productions.
The agile methodology is based on the concept of sprints—breaking down a project into continuous, small improvements. This makes production faster and encourages your team to constantly evaluate and improve their work.
Getting into that headspace can be a challenge. Many employees are used to a one-and-done approach. For decades, your team has been trained to rush under a deadline to churn out a perfect product. Encouraging them to release something they feel is “incomplete” is an uphill battle.
For leadership, the most important thing to remember is your employees will follow your lead. Constant improvement means accepting works in progress and knowing they will be improved as the project progresses.
Common Obstacles
“The common story that I'm often hearing is [IT professionals] being asked to do more with less, so they have to stretch their resources more every single day. So if you looked at a traditional converged data center architecture, you traditionally had separate compute, storage, and networking.
They all had to be managed independently. Often this led to sort of a side load management environment amongst the IT teams,” Ken Rems, a principal architect at PCS, explained.
Take Advantage of Hyperconverged Infrastructure
“Hyper convergence will help us reduce storage footprints for our customers. It'll decrease the total cost of ownership, it will increase their productivity, and it will save overall capacity. And then the last defining factor of hyper convergence is that it's the conduit to the public cloud.” - Anthony Iovino, Vice President of Business Development at PCS.
Hyperconverged infrastructure combines compute, virtualization, storage, and networking in a single cluster. This creates a dynamic system that empowers your organization with greater alignment between infrastructure and workload. The infrastructure is simple, flexible and easily automated—making it the best choice for agile teams.