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12.04.2013

Cloud IT services for SCRUM, companies getting agile with cloud services

A strange mix or bedfellows maybe?

  • SCRUM IT development with cloud IT services
  • AGILE approaches and companies and cloud, or rather, how agile companies and organisations are well suited to utilize and benefit from flexible service delivery by way of cloud IT.

Putting it very broadly - agile companies using SCRUM for a stepwise, iterative approach to IT service and business development stands to gain the most from the flexible and on-demand service delivery nature of cloud IT services, be it in the cloud infrastructure area, for platform level kind of services or in the areas of application and ready-to-go line of business services delivery.

Let's say you have agreed upon the goals and visions for your SCRUM-based work effort, the initial roadmap and product backlog has come into place with the product owner, stakeholders and team. And the initial design, sprints and infrastructure requirements has been decided upon. Then it is very easy - and, not the least, very fast to start doing the initial prototyping and spring functionalities on a basic IaaS or PaaS set-up, with limited or as-needed capacities for the core team development and testing than can be put up, expended or thorn down as needed on the hour.

Or, for instance, one is doing a SaaS-area SCRUM development effort, involving migration legacy data onto the new SaaS-services.  Once again it's quite easy to start with some initial SaaS accounts for the main SaaS roles involved, and start  importing the core data sets and look into the core SaaS functionality for the business, data flows and data collections in question.

Or for the "developing functionality from the scratch" kind of SCRUM-runs, start with some basic IaaS capacities or PaaS feature set, and then add storage, processing, networking or database capabilities as the sprints falls into place and the testing, piloting, beta and launch gets underway.

That's the basic lineup, matching the agile and iterative approaches of SCRUM with the same stepwise and flexible capabilities of cloud-based IT services. For companies who have already signed into the agile and lean approaches for business and IT development, this shouldn't be a surprise, and this way is taken for granted - cloud services and agile approaches came about more or less in the same cultural happening or paradigm even.   What's harder to archive is to change or develop let's say traditional businesses and organisations into a agile, iterative and sprint-enabled organisation.  And that's a whole MBA course just there...


Erik Jensen, 4.12.2013

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