How Passion is a Key Ingredient to Balance

Nowadays, finding the balance with conventional and agile IT is what most agencies are aiming for. So, how do you create this balance?

The federal government, specifically IT workers, are usually comfortable with traditional IT systems because they have been around for a while and they know how the system functions. And especially for those who are reliant on these standard systems to complete critical work, changing to a more modern system can be scary. The most common fear is that it won’t be as secure or accurate. But with bimodal IT, that concern can be mitigated.

Bi-modal IT is a way of managing two different, coherent modes of IT delivery to find that balance. During a recent GovLoop online training, Stability and Agility: How to Strike the Balance, we heard from Adam Clater, Officer of the Chief Technologist, North American Public Sector from Red Hat, and Eric Mandel, CEO of Blackmesh. They explained what’s going on with bimodal IT, challenges to creating a balance and what you need to successfully transform your IT infrastructure.

Find Passionate People
With government IT transitioning into a bimodal IT system, there is a key ingredient you need in your organization. Both speakers focused on a certain type of person that will help you and your organization – passionate people. These are the people who are dedicated to changing and improving IT infrastructure and want the best for your organization.

“You need to think of who is going to work on and integrate these things into your system,” said Clater. Your leadership should know who these people are and get them on board. These passionate workers want to work and succeed. “You should enable these champs and support them,” Mandel agreed.

Passion and enthusiasm are what you need in workers to achieve your goal. “Finding the passion and the people to take the ownership of the project and system” is how you and your organization will succeed, said Clater. With these passionate workers turning into champs, you will achieve the balance you want.

Start Small
Once you identify these passionate workers, both our speakers said you should start small. This means you should be prepared, implement small features, test them out and work in a smaller time frame.

Why should you want to start small when you are making a big change? “You don’t want to end up disappointed,” said Clater. Testing in small batches and seeing what works and what doesn’t is how you can improve to convert to bimodal IT smoothly. When you test smaller chunks, you are able to fix things faster rather than having a one or two year plan, then finding out something doesn’t work and realizing you have wasted more of your time.

These small successes are going to encourage your passionate workers even more and you need to continue to build on their momentum With each step you take in the right direction, you are closer to achieving balance with your IT infrastructure. “Slowly having DevOps adapt and shift focus and still deliver top notch results is what you will achieve,” said Mandel.

Overall, passionate people are necessary for your organization to head in the right direction for bimodal IT. This passion and the small successes will help create the balance you are looking for.