IT Managed Services Provider Resource Recommendation Update on August 28, 2020

What does The Three Ways mean?

The Three Ways is a set of business principles that encourage organizations to value a corporate culture in which feedback loops are short, everyone understands how different parts of the business interrelate and all employees are encouraged to seek knowledge that will help the company meet business goals.

The Three Ways were first introduced in a popular business/IT book called The Phoenix Project. The Phoenix Project’s narrative storyline shows the reader through the character’s eyes that bad things can happen when product owners, software developers, IT operations, quality assurance (QA), and security teams fail to work together as a cohesive unit.

The concept of the Three Ways is introduced by a mysterious all-knowing character in the book named Erik Reid. It provides the other characters with a framework for implementing DevOps and building a culture in which people, processes, and technology are aligned and working towards the same goal: providing value to customers.

The First Way: Systems thinking and the principles of flow
Systems thinking places value on looking at the big picture. Global performance should be prioritized over local performance, and rather than focusing on the individual performance of employees, teams, or departments, organizations should focus on creating a smooth flow of work: from Business → Development → Operations → Customer.

The Second Way: Feedback loops and the need for amplification
The Second Way places value on providing and receiving quick feedback on a continual basis. The aim is to improve work quality while also preventing repeat problems. When feedback loops are amplified, mistakes can quickly be identified and fixed. When feedback loops are continual, it’s less likely that important information will be lost due to staffing changes.

The Third Way: Creating a culture of continual experimentation and learning
The Third Way is about building a healthy organizational culture that encourages continual learning and experimentation amongst employees. Specifically, this means recognizing the importance of practice and repetition, and accepting risk-taking and making mistakes as part of the learning process.

What is SkunkWorks project (Skunk Works)?

A SkunkWorks project (also known as Skunk Works) is an innovative undertaking, involving a small group of people, that is outside the normal research and development channels within an organization.

Skunk Works is the name given to a secret R&D team at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. that was tasked with quickly developing a jet fighter for the United States during World War II. The U.S. Army’s Air Tactical Service Command approached Lockheed Aircraft in 1943 to discuss the military’s need for jet fighters to counter Nazi Germany’s airpower. Lockheed Aircraft assigned a team of engineers, led by Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson to work on the project. Just a month later, the team delivered the XP-80 Shooting Star jet fighter proposal to military officials.

Military officials quickly greenlighted the project based on the proposal, sending a formal contract for the work four months later, according to Lockheed Martin Corp. (as the global aerospace, defense and security company is now known). Johnson and his team delivered the first XP-80 in 143 days, seven days ahead of schedule, an astonishingly quick turnaround for a project of that scope.

Johnson’s pragmatic approach is credited with the speed and success of the project.

What does Operating System Virtualization (OS Virtualization) mean?

Operating system virtualization (OS virtualization) is a server virtualization technology that involves tailoring a standard operating system so that it can run different applications handled by multiple users on a single computer at a time. The operating systems do not interfere with each other even though they are on the same computer.

In OS virtualization, the operating system is altered so that it operates like several different, individual systems. The virtualized environment accepts commands from different users running different applications on the same machine. The users and their requests are handled separately by the virtualized operating system.

Also known as operating system-level virtualization.

Operating system virtualization provides application-transparent virtualization to users by decoupling applications from the OS. The OS virtualization technique offers granular control at the application level by facilitating the transparent migration of individual applications. The finer granularity migration offers greater flexibility, resulting in reduced overhead.

OS virtualization can also be used to migrate critical applications to another running operating system instance. Patches and updates to the underlying operating system are done in a timely way, and have little or no impact on the availability of application services. The processes in the OS virtualized environment are isolated and their interactions with the underlying OS instance are monitored.