Why you should involve all teams when moving to the cloud

This blog is based on my experience of working with clients from a business and technical perspective. I decided to start from the point of view a company discussing moving their product to the cloud. Most blogs I read on this topic tend to focus on just the technical teams in a company but there are benefits to including the non-tech teams in the discussion as well. Enjoy.

Every team in a business needs to be involved in discussing whether to move to cloud and the benefits to the company as a whole and that does include Marketing, Sales, HR, Quality, and Training i.e. not just the technical teams. Before even deciding which cloud provider and technologies to use, the WHY needs to be answered first and the benefits thereof.

For technical teams such as Development, Test, Operations and Support, the benefits are clearly understood…

• Promotes cross-team collaboration

• Rapid development, deployment and patching capabilities

• Readily available and dependable resources and up-to-date development utilities

• Integrated and consistent deployment environments leading to CD/CI from development environments to Production.

• Ease of building in HA/DR

• Ease of cost control

• Out-of-the-box AI capabilities

and many more.

For the non-technical teams, the advantages are not often discussed but they need to be involved and buy into the final decision.

Marketing can up-sell the product by mentioning it’s cloud based and all the joys and benefits that go with it.

Sales will of course need to know what they are selling including the benefits to the client and possibly answer why the decision was made. Having a cloud-based product will be seen by clients as a big benefit in terms of reliability, accessibility, etc.

HR will may need to re-focus their recruitment efforts getting additional people to meet the needs of cloud based development and operations. Having a cloud based product can give a company an edge on recruitment as it’s viewed as a state-of-the-art enabler which Developers and Testers will be interested in, so promoting it in a job specifications is a benefit.

The Quality team will need to redo any processes to match the rapid development nature of working in an agile environment on cloud. This can lead to a simplification of processes which is a benefit to all concerned e.g. an integrated DevOps environment. Everyone enjoys keeping it simple and this would be a great improvement for all concerned.

The Training team will need to organise updated training for existing staff and for new Engineers joining the company so need to be aware of what is being discussed and what is decided.

These are simple advantages and benefits to be easily gained by including all in the company in the discussions from the start rather than as an afterthought.

Next time.. Now you’ve decided to move to the cloud, what should you do? Stay tuned.