How Kanban helps improve IT processes

JugglingProjects

Article from ADMIN 11/2012

By Jochen Lillich

Torn between the challenges of daily IT operations and ambitious projects, admins must allocate their resources wisely. One unspectacular but effective instrument that can help is the Kanban method.

IT projects often fail, or at least cause a lot of headaches, for a number of reasons. First, a multitude of people approach the operative staff, each with their own ideas of how their individual projects should proceed; however, they all agree on one thing: Their project must be handled urgently. Projects are initiated by almost every part of an enterprise (e.g., marketing, product management, personnel), and, of course, no project is unimportant, so the people responsible expect the operations team to give their project top priority. When all projects are supposed to receive preferred treatment, the admin is left to solve the resulting unavoidable conflicts.

Second, internal projects necessary to ensure stable operation of the IT infrastructure and equip it for the future need attention. Backup systems must be scaled up, monitoring must keep up with an ever increasing number of checks and metrics, and the admin might have a long-hedged wish to introduce a configuration management utility like Puppet or Chef. However, a plan to reserve manpower for these internal tasks usually harvests about as much approval outside of IT as a proposal for a week-long department excursion.

Third, the situation is made more complicated by the large spectrum of responsibilities that fall under the "operations" roof. Layer models like ISO/OSI graphically document just how far the work of a network administrator is removed from that of a database manager. But the diversity is great even on the same layer; you only need to think of Apache and nginx, Varnish and Squid, MySQL and Oracle.

Finally, one of the most important differences between a software development team and an operations team is the amount of unplanned work. Every problem that interrupts normal operations means that one or more admins gets torn from their planned tasks. Unfortunately, such interruptions are frequent.