Sorry middle managers, your services are no longer needed

Middle managers are a sort of cancer. They add unnecessary steps to simple processes, and–in an effort to justify their own existence–often make things more complex than they need to be. The DevOps movement is making middle managers obsolete.

I wrote about in a recent post:

How many IT people does it take to produce an application? Actually, let me rephrase that. How many IT people does it take to produce an application effectively and efficiently? For many organizations, the answer to the second question is less than the answer to the first because the traditional IT hierarchy includes layers of middle-manager decision makers that weigh everything down.

One of the things that DevOps helps companies accomplish is to eliminate unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles so the people trying to get things done can just do what they know how to do. The traditional IT model reminds me a little of putting a police officer in the middle of an intersection to direct traffic when there are already stoplights or stop signs present. Every licensed driver already knows the proper protocols and procedures for driving collaboratively and sharing the road so that everyone gets safely through the intersection. The police officer just disrupts an otherwise smooth process, and wastes resources that could be put to better use elsewhere—like maybe pulling over that car going 75mph in a 45mph zone, but I digress.

For some reason, it is a fairly normal, natural evolution for a business to add layers of middle-management decision makers as it grows. Sometimes those roles are a function of wanting to promote people when there is really nowhere to promote them to, and the role makes sense at the time. In fact, the initial creation of many such roles is actually intended to help the business operate more efficiently. An upper manager starts to get too much on his plate, and delegates power to intermediaries so that decisions can be made at a lower level, and the upper manager’s lack of availability doesn’t become a roadblock to progress.

Read the full post at DevOps.com: DevOps cuts out the unnecessary middle-man.

What do you think? Share in the comments below…