Why Your DevOps Strategy Is Not Creating Business Value
The difference between BizDevOps and DevOps: it’s not just about automation and speed to delivery, it is about creating the best user experience in order to drive your business.
DevOps is the Ford-ism of the digital age. By reorganizing the assembly lines in charge of development and operations, companies can continuously deliver the highest quality software to their users.
It’s what makes the difference in this fast-paced digital market. Look at Amazon and Netflix for example; customers expect their content to be available on-the-go and updated often, all packaged into a seamless experience. In order to continuously deliver a software of the highest quality, you need your teams to be working together in a much more collaborative manner. And this is where the DevOps approach comes in.
DevOps has spread like wildfire. In 2018, only 9% of software developers claimed to have not adopted DevOps (without any plans to). But with popularity comes shortcomings. Companies have primarily focused on increasing the speed of their development processes rather than on driving business outcomes. In this sense, a lot of companies that adopt DevOps are not seeing any improvements on their growth.
1. You are not focusing on the right metrics — KPIs
You can have outstanding metrics in deployment frequency and mean time to repair (MTTR), none of that means anything if your product does not bring more value to your customers. DevOps is not only about automating delivery, it is about the entire process from ideation to production.
As Gartner says IT leaders should measure the success based on “time to production and business value and impact”. Speed of delivery is good, but its the business value that will determine your commercial success.
Improving your speed and team efficiency, mitigating risks are they are the means through which you can offer your customers a better service. To have a successful strategy you need to focus on the end-user experience and to measure outcome based on measurable metrics.
How do you measure success? How many people are visiting your site and is that number increasing? How long does it take for your pages take to load on average? How many unexpected errors are your users experiencing? Are they happy with your product?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tell you whether your internal processes are bringing value to your business. They tell you whether there are issues affecting your customers in production. In other words they measure of the quality of the end-user experience you are delivering.
2. There is not enough collaboration between teams
The most fundamental thing to take away from the DevOps method is that teams that collaborate together are more efficient. But in order to deliver to your customers the best experience possible, you need to bring together more than just your Dev and Ops teams.
In a company, there are many teams involved in creating a software of quality. A true collaborative environments needs to en-globe all those involved in the customer-facing aspect of your offering.
Let’s take an e-commerce for example. The goal is to provide the best experience for your users so that they convert easily. There are many teams involved in this process; you have the DevOps groups of Developers, Ops and QA’s who create the platform and ensure that there are no technical roadblocks along the user journeys. You have the Support teams who handle customer requests and complaints. You then have the Product teams who analyse how customers behave on the website in order to optimize it. Understandably, all of these teams indirectly work together. Support transmits information about bugs to development teams; product managers let development teams know what they want from the app; but they do not work together.
This is because every team has their own set of tools that they use for their very specialized tasks. The tools are complex, costly and create internal segregation. Because of that, a Forrester report makes the observation that enterprises are calling for more user-friendly, integrated, coherent and uniform platforms.
Conclusion?
We need is more user-friendly integrated tools.
Ask yourself: how many tools is your company currently using? How many are actually being used to their full extent? How many teams are using the same tools? How much is that costing you? Can your teams easily collaborate on these tools?
Having a hundred different tools that are highly-specialized does not help you become more internally efficient. Not only is it a heavy cost, you cannot expect your teams to work organically together if everyone is using different tools that only they can use. This is why it is important for your tools to be both integrated with each other and user-friendly.
If you have a unified software that doesn’t necessarily require a degree in computing to use, your different teams can work together to deliver the highest quality product you can offer.
Your product teams can keep an eye on the KPIs and evaluate whether your business is growing, or whether there are any changes that your developers can bring in order to improve it. Your support and testing teams can both monitor the issues your users currently face (those that affect your conversions the most) in order to become more reactive at fixing them. And the list goes on: when using a more integrated, unified platform, your teams become more fluid and get a clearer understanding of how to drive business value.
BizDevOps
At Asayer, we believe that the best teams are those that collaborate together to deliver a software of the highest quality. DevOps teams, Customer Support teams and Product Managers all have the same goal of providing their customers with the best product and experience possible. Therefore, it is by working together that they can get a better understanding of what their users want, the issues they face and the ways they can optimize their offering.
When your teams work together and you keep a clear focus on your business goals, that is when you can talk about BizDevOps. That is, employing the DevOps approach to improve your business.
That is why our mission is to create a unified platform that can be used collaboratively by all those involved in the creation of the ultimate user experience in order to drive your business.
