Info Support supports VECOZO in gradual introduction of DevOps teams within the IT organisation

“Info Support has made an important contribution to the strong growth that VECOZO has experienced in recent years.” With these words, Ton Bogerd, IT Manager of VECOZO begins the conversation about the gradual introduction of DevOps teams within his organization. In such multidisciplinary teams, the distinction between developing software and testing, deploying and managing it is increasingly blurred, resulting in faster and better delivery of new software.

Where IT is organized into separate development, testing and management teams, tooling and the people are often internally focused, and alignment is a lengthy process. The business, on the other hand, wants fast delivery of new functionality and high-quality IT. By deploying new technologies and methodologies, VECOZO, together with Info Support, has begun to incorporate the entire software lifecycle – from analysis to deployment – into one integrated working method.

“With the substantial growth of VECOZO, the old way of rolling out new software is in need of a new efficiency improvement,” says Igor van Haren, a technical specialist at Info Support who has worked at VECOZO for many years. Although software is delivered in short ‘sprints’ using the ‘agile’ Scrum development methodology, the rollout to the production environment takes place once a month, in part because the rollout is relatively time-consuming. “Once a month in the evening, virtually the entire system goes offline for a few hours – including the parts that are not affected by the new software. With the increase in the number of services, greater flexibility is desired.”

Whereas rollout to production environments and management was the responsibility of technical application management in the old situation, “we are now bringing development and management closer together,” Bogerd said. “Elsewhere, they call that DevOps. “The new, complementary infrastructure that VECOZO recently purchased is also going to help us roll out new software more segmented and faster.” Van Haren adds that a solid underlying application architecture is also very important here, something to which Info Support is certainly contributing.

VECOZO’s IT organization is therefore in a change process in which three elements play a central role in conjunction:

• Integrated tooling in which code is delivered in an automated manner as much as possible, in which automated testing is performed, and in which applications are placed in any desired environment in a fully automated manner.
• Clear processes and methodologies to guide software from development to deployment and management.
• Involved employees who are aware of their own role in the success of the whole, close cooperation between developers and administrators, and Info Supporters and VECOZO employees who inspire, connect and strengthen each other mutually.

“We work with highly advanced tools that have been amply proven in the market,” Bogerd said. “In all this, Info Supports Endeavour ‘shines through’. The high quality of the work is also reflected in the independent Software Improvement Group (SIG) ratings, which are above the global standard.”

DevOps breaks through the traditional organizational structure of an IT department. Its power lies in the combination of tooling, processes and people. “For me, it’s primarily about the goal,” Bogerd says. “Look, tooling and methodologies are important, but they are means, not ends. The same goes for DevOps itself.” The members of each team have a common goal, and they can achieve it as a team precisely because they possess skills that complement each other. “In time, the DevOps teams can even grow further into full-fledged high performance teams.” And combined with the new infrastructure, applications and application architecture, VECOZO even has Continuous Delivery in its sights. With not inconsiderable thanks to Info Support.