When it comes to choosing a development partner for your digital initiative, there is a lot of advice available out there. What are the big factors to consider? How should you compare the array of different options? In fact, we wrote our own blog on the topic a little while ago, “How do You Make Sense of the Spectrum of App Dev Options?” However, less attention is paid to the benefits for enterprises of developing the necessary skills themselves.
This is interesting because for many firms, the real goal would be to deliver their dream digital initiative using home-grown capabilities. Once upon a time, it was standard practice to do so. It is easy to see why so many enterprises now choose the flexibility of partnering with digital specialists when you consider the incredible complexity of the devices, communications protocols and software to contend with.
Just keeping up with changing software, hardware and all the associated development and test techniques can feel like a full-time job, and few have the time to devote themselves to it properly. One concern clients have is that they’ll spend time training staff on technologies that will go out of favor. My response: choose wisely but do invest in your team’s skillset, because it’s a great way of improving productivity and motivating staff.
Developing DevOps
Enterprises today are significantly scaling up their DevOps practices. Even when the willingness to embrace change is there, too often enterprises struggle to find the right skills. In the context of DevOps, where we aim to tear down the barriers between dev, test and ops, the particular challenge we face is cross-training staff across all these disciplines.
Firms that feel they have come to rely on external specialists for their digital projects can look at what’s required to bring their in-house team up to speed, and… well, they back away from the task. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to see why training can end up taking a back seat when real deadlines build up. However, I have also seen first-hand the benefits such training achieves from my work with Apexon’s own training services.
In fact, because we believe strongly in the importance of training, we’re introducing a new suite of Enterprise Jenkins training services in collaboration with our partner, CloudBees, the enterprise Jenkins company. Our investment in training is part of our ongoing commitment to help customers advance their DevOps maturity and make progress on the road to digital transformation.
For example, we recently worked with a large US national bank to train 150 of their employees in CloudBees and guess what? This led directly to a 60 percent reduction in support issues. The right training shouldn’t be viewed as an overhead, it’s actually a cost reduction measure when you consider the efficiencies gained.
Accelerating DevOps Maturity
If you’re heading to Jenkins World next week, we have a packed schedule aimed at helping enterprises advance their DevOps transformation. Highlights include:
- Get a free DevOps maturity assessment (visit us at booth #415)
- Join a two-day training course to help prepare Jenkins Certification (August 28-29th)
- Hear Sanil Pillai, director of Apexon Labs, discuss how to “Auto-Convert Your Freestyle Jenkins Jobs to Coded Pipeline” (August 30th)
- Jumpstart your Jenkins 2.0 with our free, 90-minute session covering key features of Jenkins 2.0, Jenkins Blue Ocean, migration tips and a primer on writing CI/CD pipeline as code. Reserve your spot at booth #415.
Book a Session with our DevOps Experts
Don’t worry if you can’t make it to Jenkins World in person. Try our Free Online DevOps Maturity Model Assessment and see how your organization measures up against industry best practices