The Impact of DevOps on Traditional ERP Transformation Project Management

Arnab is Senior Director – Customer Engagement at NTT DATA Inc. He leads several key engagements within NTT DATA and has been the architect of various innovative solutions in the ERP space, which has been adopted by various multi-nationals. He has played a pioneering role in creating business opportunities through pioneering technology solutions in his space.

  Agile  

Since the start of the DevOps movement in Scandinavian Europe in 2009, the impact of the underlying philosophy had not been felt as strongly in the U.S. software development industry as in recent years. But concepts like continuous delivery along with DevOps are starting to have a long-term, transformative impact on the way software projects are being managed in the United States.

It should be noted that many large U.S. technology companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.) have been early adapters of these principles (which was actually a well-kept secret until recently). These companies, however, have the advantage of primarily developing custom code for bespoke applications, which are at the heart of their intellectual property.

But what about large enterprises that are trying to embrace these principles for their ERP transformation programs and similar other packaged software implementations? How should the project managers running these projects tailor their traditional project management principles to adapt to the new philosophy? It is especially more relevant as some of the DevOps principles seem to be in apparent contradiction to some of the core project management tenets.

Core DevOps principles
Let’s start by looking at the core tenets of the DevOps movement, popularly known as CALMS amongst practitioners:

Figure 1: Core DevOps principles

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