Every year brings new challenges and seasonal peaks such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday. During these events, businesses experience an unusual amount of pressure followed by a faster pace of work, a higher volume of transactions, etc. Companies are most vulnerable during seasonal peaks because of the many challenges they must conquer.
Author: Derrick Meeks
Managing traffic influx is just the tip of the iceberg. Business leaders must find innovative and effective ways to solve problems and handle the tasks such as performance and load testing, rebuilding catalog infrastructure, and ensuring every prospect receives an unprecedented customer experience.
Black Friday puts a lot of pressure on development teams. They must manage their everyday tasks and handle the complexity of massive sales while working on tight deadlines. Thankfully, they’re not alone in this never-ending struggle.
Enter Agile. Agile is the solution for mitigating crises and short periods by diminishing the barrier between increased market needs and limited resources. Let’s discuss how combining DevOps and Agile can help a business during seasonal peaks.
Black Friday madness from project management viewpoint
Black Friday sales can be highly profitable to any company. However, the main criterion is that you should start building its plan sometime in the fall. You cannot expect that developers or marketers will complete tasks last minute. Even if they do, they might not be calculated enough. Therefore, dedicate enough time to prep for each step, add necessary content to websites or apps, and craft design inviting web elements.
Agile to the rescue
Aside from helping your development teams handle the absolute business overload, Agile allows you to prioritize robust feedback and self-organizing teams to mitigate the shifting business requirements by tapping into highly flexible workflows.
Thanks to this flexibility, your teams can shift focus where it’s needed the most. If any unpredictable situation arises, your teams can swiftly refocus to manage it. In addition to increased Agile flexibility, business teams have another solution for handling crises like Black Friday – DevOps.
DevOps provides a systematic corporate workflow for cooperation between operations and development teams. Although Agile and DevOps overlap, the latter offers a systematic approach throughout the entire product lifecycle. In other words, DevOps allows businesses to meet customers’ needs during the high seasonal peaks.
Harnessing the power of automation
The last annual quarter is usually the most challenging for organizations. It puts your entire team to the test and requires immense effort to get things right. Things can become messy, especially for companies that still struggle with repetitive and mundane tasks.
Since obsolete manual processes are prone to human error, it’s pretty easy to let industry standards slip. The last thing you need during seasonal peaks is to expose high-availability workflows to errors. Since mistakes can only increase traffic volume, you could be facing severe repercussions.
Fortunately, you can resolve such problems with the power of automation. It eliminates mundane and repetitive tasks and protects your processes against human errors.
DevOps is all about automation. It allows you to harness its power and use it to maximize efficiency when processing documentation and deploying software. However, its best benefit is making your production teams more adaptable, efficient, and faster.
Since it removes time-consuming tasks from the equation, DevOps allows your teams to shift their focus to the core missions while facilitating optimal data transfer between them. Everybody receives information on time, while DevOps simplifies the process of mitigating marketing challenges during high seasons.
Workflow flexibility to ensure product quality
Cyber Monday and Black Friday are all about scalability and agility. Although seasonal peaks offer lucrative opportunities for businesses, they must maintain effective systems and processes to cope with increased demand.
In other words, organizations depend on the flexibility of their systems, processes, and teams to add significant value and accomplish revenue potential. Agile teams typically cover two-week spans to cope with the increased business load.
Each span brings new features that must be usable to meet the business goals. Relying only on Agile won’t be sufficient to accomplish such a mission. However, your teams have higher chances of delivering products that offer incremental value with DevOps.
It empowers them to focus on developers, product management, and customer service and develop cutting-edge products that can meet even the highest customer expectations. While Agile makes your teams productive, DevOps supplies the flexibility and efficiency they need to move in the right direction.
More importantly, it ensures higher product quality despite seasonal peaks and high traffic spikes. Agile covers timely incentives and evaluation while DevOps handles the integration, and everything works harmoniously.
Consider the human factor
Keep in mind to consider the human factor during the Black Friday chaos. People will likely cash in on their remaining vacation days. Additionally, many teams might choose to work from home during the colder months. Companies should prepare for this in advance, like making all resources available to anyone working from home.
Another thing for successful project management is shaping security guidelines for remotely working employees. For instance, VPN for PC should be a standard followed across the company. A Virtual Private Network is a tool that guarantees secure connections. Knowing that employees might not employ the necessary protections for networks, a VPN does it most of the job for them. It encrypts web traffic and guarantees that corporate workload happens in a secure environment.
Conclusion
Organizations need to prepare for the seasonal peaks. For instance, downtime of websites or services can be extremely costly. Thus, teams should productively deal with any issues hindering the success of special promotions or features.
The combination of Agile and DevOps brings numerous benefits to organizations. They can develop more flexible workflows and infrastructures for mitigating challenges and problems during high seasonal peaks without sacrificing the quality of their products or services.
Instead of engulfing your teams in loads of mundane tasks, you can use this combination to leverage seasonality and provide your customers with high-end products and features while saving time, effort, and resources. The powerful combination of DevOps and Agile is the solution if you need an effective way to optimize your performance and deliver better results.
About the Author
Derrick Meeks is a copywriter writing about various business topics such as team management, productivity, marketing. He’s been a business area geek for 8 years now and still seeks for new information and findings which he represents in his articles.