DevOps is the philosophy that has been in use in the IT business for more than ten years. It all started with a problem: people who were responsible for app development did not care about costs of …..product release. When one function was added, servers were down as they could not handle relevant calculations. The application didn’t work. Developers put the blame on sever maintenance staff, who would react by saying that no one had discussed higher loads with them. It was chaos (!)
DevOps requires that you bring together, under one roof, people who are in charge of development and the operation of your application. Soon, they’d be joined by quality assurance staff, and here you have DevOps as it is known today.
Let’s be creative, connect the dots and translate DevOps into the real estate business. Throughout my professional life I worked on both sides: first, when I built the BP fuel station network and co-create Manufaktura Center in Łódź, I was on a Dev side. Then, at Philips I got my first epiphany. It came out of a true shift in my perspective and maybe a temporary (as I thought back then) demotion. I became …a building maintenance specialist. The building in question was the one I had in my portfolio as project manager and dealt with from scratch to the relocation of the whole organization. I started to gather lessons on what worked and what was simply poorly designed, invented or even executed. I reclassified investment spending from ROI (return on investment) to expenditure, which I had to reduce and streamline at all cost. With this knowledge I set off for a new adventure, this time with Skanska, where after development effort we moved to the operation stage of the office space.
Since then, in every company I’d use DevOps philosophy: I bring together, in “one room”, the builders and the users – those with maintenance responsibilities, I add quality assurance professionals and… they come up with amazing solutions that have never been seen before.
Thank to this approach, together with Echo Investment we could embark on an innovative project to build a new residential estate in Łódź. We were not only a developer. We devised the whole experience of a sustainable district. This is what it means an idea multiplied by action.
DevOps in Real Estate – a few words about the idea, leadership, changes in today’s world, and whether this innovation has the potential for widespread adoption in the Real Estate industry? – recording from the Innovation Leaders Meetup at Digital Real Estate.
