Agile Infrastructure Boot Camp

Part 1: The Case for Agility and DevOps

1. The heritage of Agile and DevOps
2. The business case for DevOps
3. Common Agile DevOps principles
4. Goals of Agile DevOps
5. Understanding the overall value chain
6. Exercise: Defining your goals

Part 2: Critical Principles of Agile & Scrum

1. Effective and quick response to change
2. Feedback loops
3. Adaptation of work
4. Cross-functional roles
5. Continuous Integration
6. Timeboxing
7. Velocity tracking
8. Linking work to end value
9. Mindset and culture
10. Exercise: Assessing cultural profile

Part 3: Agile Infrastructure

1. Iterating operational work
2. Scrum in operational work
3. Unified IT retrospectives
4. Designing infrastructure goals
5. Matching infrastructure to application goals
6. Cloud engineering benefits
7. Reducing skills-based silos
8. Tools for implementing agile infrastructure

Part 4: Sprints – Agile Practices Applied

1. Planning
2. Vision
3. Roadmaps
4. Running a sprint
5. Maintaining a backlog
6. Grooming a backlog
7. Retrospectives
8. Velocity and velocity tracking
9. Stakeholder roles
10. Exercise: An operational sprint simulation

Part 5: Managing Work in Process (WIP)

1. Planned vs. Unplanned work
2. The danger of heroics
3. Queuing and slack
4. Prioritization heuristics
5. Preparing for and avoiding emergencies
6. Exercise: Understanding value streams and WiP

Part 6: Kanban – Tracking Operational and IT Service Work

1. The Kanban system
2. Kanban roots: gaining perspective
3. Visualizing work
4. Push vs. pull stimulus
5. Lean principles
6. Upper and lower work limits
7. Queues and buffers
8. Bottlenecks
9. Blocked Work

Part 7: Waste and Application of Lean Principles

1. Overproduction
2. Work in Progress (WIP)
3. Overburdening of teams
4. Time available (idle states or waiting)
5. Processing
6. Inventory, stock, unused assets
7. Handoffs and movement of work
8. Defects
9. Latent skill
10. Exercise: Identifying waste

Part 8: Scalability

1. Linking business value to operational work
2. Scaled Agile principles for increased capacity
3. Automation and scaled infrastructure
4. Prioritization
5. Throttling operational work
6. Dissolving operational silos

Part 9: Going Back to Work with a Plan

1. Identifying your goals
2. Next steps

• IT operations professionals

• Adopt agile practices for working with traditional IT hardware
• Establish literacy with how agile practices apply to non-technology work
• Apply agile methods for managing infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud services
• Learn how agility can be adapted to work with networks, databases, routers, and other operational infrastructure
• Better integrate upstream technology project work with downstream dependencies
• Better manage work-in-process (WIP) through techniques like Kanban and WiP limits
• Better processes for managing planned vs. unplanned work
• Adopt agile practices for better avoiding emergencies and heroics
• Learn what has worked well in other organizations