When development becomes operations

Into every developer's life a little operations must fall. At least if you're not a contractor that splits as soon as some JO calls the project code complete. So the question is how to handle this.

While I have done my obligatory stints at Microslop, most of my gigs have been at smaller shops that didn't have the luxury of an operational team or needed to compose one after the fact. In all cases the developers needed to provide at least some of the operational support immediately after release, and often into perpetuity.

Coming back to Agile, how do you effectively manage both this operational need and continue to move forward on development. One of the precepts of agile development is to focus on one product/problem at a time. It is well documented that task switching is incredibly wasteful, so we try and avoid this at all costs. The tack we've tried to take is rather than putting everyone on 50% time (50% dev, 50% operations) we've split the team to two developers purely tasked with moving forward on the next version, and two developers who are floaters (ex: 80% ops/20% dev).

In practice it has been somewhat effective. The next version is moving forward at a predictable (albeit slow) pace. Operations is being handled. There is some frustration within the dev team, although it's isolated to about half the team instead of everyone being stuck in the mud. And our task breakdown has become less 0/100 & 80/20 and more 10/90 & 80/20 for ops vs. development time allocation. Can't wait for our ops team to gell and come up to speed.