Most of IT by now is familiar with DevOps as the movement that steered organizations away from yesterday’s defunct methods of software development towards smarter more efficient ways of building applications. 5 out of 10 organizations practice DevOps, and out of those, a majority says that DevOps practices have helped them improve team performance and collaboration, finds a survey of 500 DevOps practitioners by Atlassian.
Although originated in IT, DevOps appears everywhere in diverse forms, and its principles are applied in all places of business.
DevOps speaker, Chrystina Nguyen observed, “DevOps is everywhere.”
“It is a culture, a group of people working together to produce a product and having that seamless teamwork culture conversation,” she said while giving an Ignite Talk at the AppDev Field Day event in May.
Drawing on a 2019 talk of her’s, Nguyen’s speech provides a refreshing view of the universality of DevOps principles and practices, and its application within the restaurant industry.
The DevOps Cycle Is at the Core of Iterative Improvement in Restaurant Business
The DevOps lifecycle is often represented through a diagram called the DevOps loop. The DevOps loop is an infinity loop that represents the continuous nature of the methodology.
It visualizes various phases of the DevOps lifecycle – plan, code, test, release, deploy, operate and monitor. The phases sequentially flow from one to the next leading back to the start again, forming a closed loop.
The loop aims to show that every phase in the development lifecycle builds on the previous one and a change in one reflects a change in the other.
As feedback from a last cycle comes through, this loop allows them to be absorbed in the new cycle for enhancement of the following phases.
The constant optimization helps ensure that there are fewer bugs and errors, and the products are optimized for a rich user experience.
The loop of continual improvement is the secret sauce of restaurant operations. For decades, restauranters have intuitively practiced the feedback loop to enhance and personalize customer experience.
When a diner sends back a dish, the chefs and cooks back of the house instantly replace it with something better curated to the customers’ palate, while taking notes for future deliveries.
Nguyen who transitioned from a long career in the restaurant industry to public speaking owns a firm called Ghost Management LLC that provides event marketing for small businesses. In her business, she leans on DevOps principles as a way to regularly check-in with clients and connect their preferences and suggestions with business goals.
“Communication is key,” she said. “Just like it is in your relationships and friendships and in events like this, having a space where people can communicate is important.”
Nguyen borrowed from her experiences and takeaways from her restaurant days to support her statement. She pointed to four elements as the building blocks of the DevOps culture – communication, shared accountability, results and a recognition that all units are different.
“There’s a lot of teams involved when it comes to restaurants, and between them, they have a shared accountability that if something goes down, everybody goes down. It’s not just a siloed effect,” she said.
Achieving Operational Efficiencies with through Transparent Communication
The staff at the back of the house and front of the house are joined by this continuous system that allows customer inputs to be shared in a series of ongoing and structured conversations.
Nyugen says that even a casual exchange in the hallway about a client’s remark or a concern they raised regarding the service can go a long a way in making small improvements happen over time. Every rating or comment yields precious bytes of information that if utilized can help make the process more rigorous.
The DevOps loop kickstarts with such inputs. “The DevOps processes is so agile that they can get a new plate, a new product, or a new line of code, right back out to you so that it can help you get out of a downtime or whatever it may be, in mostly minutes,” she said.
This underlines the importance and effectivity of sharing and communication in business. If clients do not shy away from sharing difficult feedback, and if that message is responsibly carried back to the managers and developers, it can unlock improvements in product quality, employee productivity and ultimately customer satisfaction.
However, one must respect the fine line between being candid and being picky, says Nyugen.
If done properly, the DevOps loop can allow developers to deliver products aligned with the business needs and customer expectations as opposed to deploying them blindly without an afterthought. And in restaurants, it can help the staff better connect with the diners and build a stronger engagement.
Adopting the agile methodology which involves distributing work among various groups of people further reinforces the DevOps culture.
“Small batch size is king,” says Nyugen. “You’re not cooking huge batches of soups and freezing them. Instead, you have small batches that is a quicker process and easier to fix versus taking down a whole dish and recreating it from scratch.”
“You already have some of the items prepped and ready. It’s about putting them together quick enough so that the dish reaches the customer, and they’re not left waiting while the rest of the tables eat.”
This division of labor promotes agility leading to significantly shorter release cycles. “Speed and quality come into play when all the teams are working cohesively much like a very well-thought-out DevOps team.”
Wrapping Up
No strategy can fully eliminate the occasional slipups that’re inevitable with humans being part of the loop. Preventing those isolated bad experiences from becoming a standard is where the true power of DevOps lies. A forceful collaborative effort wins out against all odds.
“There’s a lot that can happen in any environment and you can’t predict everything but if you have good processes and good team communication, it really helps the DevOps process.”
To know more, check out Chrystina’s Ignite Talk – DevOps on the Menu – from the AppDev Field Day event at Gestaltit.com.
