Project management is important for all organisations. It involves detailed planning, resource allotment, and perfect coordination between multiple stakeholders to deliver the final product within the time and budget. Companies can make use of IT management tool to handle their resources in the best way and complete the project efficiently.
If we talk about DevOps, it is an approach to software development that expands the principles of agile development by integrating the IT team’s development and operation departments. The integration helps in a seamless flow between the software development lifecycle’s conventionally divided parts.
The whole software development lifecycle uses the DevOps methodology, from software creation through testing, operations, and deployment. You can hire DevOps services and solutions for continuous delivery and better time-to-market.
DevOps project management
Project management is adapted to and supports the DevOps concept in DevOps project management, which combines the two disciplines. In this project, the project managers act as coordinators between multiple contributors and trackers of timelines & dependencies.
Project managers must closely align with the DevOps teams and bring a strong understanding of the development process and skills for creating the final product. There are many practices that the managers need to follow to achieve integration with the DevOps pipeline.
DevOps project management Best Practices
Following are the DevOps project management best practices:
- Embrace the MVP mindset.
Regarding software development, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the simplest version of the application that meets the project’s central requirements. At the end of every sprint, DevOps uses the MVP philosophy to ensure there is a deliverable.
DevOps is increasingly seen as a continuous improvement process rather than a linear procedure with fixed start and end dates.
The benefits of the MVP mindset are that customers get it fast, and their feedback helps teams to take the right actions. Otherwise, the team may deliver a product that may not be as per the expectations of the people.
- Focus on time as well as quality deliveries.
Project management focuses a lot on adhering to deadlines. Many teams measure success based on qualitative factors to see if the customer is meeting the goals with the application.
It is clear that a quick turnaround team is very important, and in the same way, allocating time & resources for ensuring high-standard quality is met. While making the decision on the goals, the project managers have to consider both these factors.
- Emphasise dependencies.
Tracking the dependencies go beyond configuration management. It needs to maintain visibility into moving parts of the IT environment and the DevOps team.
Each deliverable must fully function in the current environment and be ready to deploy at the end of each DevOps cycle. If the speed of the delivery gets affected due to a backlog of tasks or a system requirement not being met, then you need more detailed dependency tracking.
- Use the tools to do the heavy lifting.
Automation is important in DevOps to scale the impact of the team’s effort, and DevOps project management is also the same. Project management tools give a single source of truth for how work has been assigned, how the project is moving, and what the issues are in the way.
Best DevOps project management tools
Here, we will see the best DevOps project management tools:
- Azure Boards
It is a project management tool that integrates with the larger Azure DevOps suite to cover Test Plans, Pipelines, Repos, and the entire DevOps lifecycle. Azure Boards has Kanban boards, team dashboards, and custom reporting to track every stage of development.
Azure also offers pre-built and personalised workflows to ensure you capture every task.
- Jira
It is a project management and issue tracking platform. It allows project managers and members to collaborate during project planning, tracking, and release. You can also develop a release management implementation plan for quick and efficient releases.
- AWS DevOps
It is a complete toolset for managing pipelines and creating software on the same stack. The pre-built tools like CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, etc., support the whole lifecycle and can be deployed in the cloud or on the local machines.
The AWS DevOps also gives access to thousands of additional tools for improved project management and development capabilities.
- GitLab
GitLab is an app for the entire DevOps lifecycle that emphasises managing team members’ tasks. It uses issues for tracking the tasks & labels, milestones, and iterations to categorise these issues for coordination.
GitLab also provides visualisations for quickly seeing the progress towards the goals and integrates with code merge requests to correlate the issues directly.
- Asana
It is a project management tool that is designed to make the process of capturing assignments simple and automatic. It provides various views of tasks, including timelines and boards for providing the context needed for prioritising the work.
Project managers may implement approvals and alter processes to suit the team’s requirements using forms, templates, and rules. It also integrates with around 200 productivity tools, which also include GitHub and GitLab.
How can DevOps project management lead to better outcomes?
When you combine the practice of DevOps with the project management principles, you can get the best coordination between the team members and the big goals. It will improve outcomes by ensuring tasks are correctly scoped and dependencies are monitored, so the application is prepared for deployment.
The project management tools of DevOps make the process simple and promote visibility between project managers and team individuals so that everyone is on the same note and moves towards a single common goal.
Final words
At last, we would say that DevOps is a very useful methodology for companies. It helps organisations to grow their ability to deliver software and applications at high speed. In this competitive world, where enterprises are releasing software frequently, it is important to match their speed, and DevOps can be helpful in that.
Most importantly, DevOps will improve your project management pipelines and enhance the overall performance of your team.