What Is The Main Goal Of DevOps Transformation?
Developing software is a complex process. There are many moving parts, and it’s difficult to know where each part fits into the greater scheme of things.
As a result of this complexity, we must first assign value to any changes we’re trying to make in an organization. That means understanding what value really is. Also, since humans run these systems, many other factors are involved with this goal beyond just technology or even people issues.
Businesses develop software for a reason: to get business value.
What is the main goal of the enterprise-scale DevOps transformation? DevOps help to optimize the flow of value from idea to end-user and encourage collaboration to get this business value.
DevOps is more than just development and operations working together; it’s a cultural change for a company to be successful with DevOps, so culture is a big focus.
Ability To Deliver Value
Delivering customer value is crucial for ongoing survival and growth, but businesses often struggle to do so effectively.
How can you improve software development? You’ve tried Agile and Scrum before, but it just hasn’t worked.
At the end of the day, you have to deliver working software. You can’t do this if you don’t know what works and doesn’t work.
The problem is that you have no easy way to find out what works or doesn’t work without making mistakes, going down blind alleys, spending time and money on things that are a waste of resources.
With DevOps, you reduce risk and time to market. Your business becomes more agile, adaptable and responsive to change as it learns from each experiment. This also helps you measure what really counts: your customers’ needs and expectations. So you can make better decisions about how to deliver value for them in the future.
Experiment To Learn
Experimentation allows teams to learn faster by reducing the uncertainty involved and deliver value to customers faster. In addition, this helps them react to changing business needs faster than traditional processes allow.
But how to test more effectively by learning from your experiments, so you spend less time doing experiments that don’t produce results or learning lessons the hard way?
At Continuous, we believe that bringing visibility into what happens between backlog (epics, user stories…) and end-users receiving the product can drastically improve how organizations work today. Therefore, we first eliminate waste in the software development process by focusing on visibility and maximising developers’ time delivering business value.
Measure What Counts
One of the biggest pain is there is no feedback loop. By focusing on metrics, you can gain immediate visibility into the application lifecycle, performance and release velocity, giving you actionable metrics about your application delivery process.
Historically, software development organizations have had a hard time measuring what counts. However, when it comes to metrics-driven software development, connecting applications with great metrics is key.
Measurements help addressing the core DevOps goal enhance the end-to-end pipeline.
Ability To Produce Software Faster
Getting application delivery right is at the heart of success in IT today. Under pressure to deliver software fast, IT is not getting the best out of its people or processes. Teams are losing time, money and effort in unproductive activities such as bug fixing and re-work.
We have seen so many software teams trying to improve their delivery performance in the past few years. But they are not improving their delivery performance at an acceptable rate without Continuous Delivery best practices.
Through DevOps, we help improve your teams’ delivery performance to meet your business objectives consistently. The process encompasses the ability to build fast and deliver quickly and with quality throughout the entire software development lifecycle using Continuous Delivery core concepts.
DevOps is also a process improvement culture that helps eliminates waste in software development by bringing business, developers and operations together through collaborative problem-solving.
To address the DevOps goal, we have to focus on how we’re performing as an organization. So let’s build a foundation that allows us to deliver software faster by putting people first, creating agile teams with shared ownership and responsibility across the entire organization and allowing for autonomy while still preserving accountability for our work.
This is only possible through three essential aspects: improving the value chain, breaking down silos and creating cross-functional teams.
Improving Value Chain
Do you feel that your business is not as productive as it used to be? Do you find it difficult to meet all the deadlines for your products or services?
It was the year 1985 when the professor of business strategy at Harvard University, Michael Porter, published the book “Competitive Advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance” in which the “Value Chain” model of a company is developed.
Porter’s value chain is a management tool that allows mapping and analyzing the activities that add value to a company, distributing them into primary activities: those dedicated to the development of the product or service that generates value for the company, and secondary activities or support: which are those necessary for the proper functioning of the company.
The objective of the value chain is to identify which are the sources of the generation of value of the company in the production process of its goods or services.
The value chain is a holistic view of the processes in an organization. It enables management to understand the impact of specific changes on the entire organization.
In this world, everything is connected. Changes in one part of the organization affect other parts.
Organizations must be able to respond quickly to changing market conditions. However, most organizations have become so complex that they cannot react quickly because it’s difficult for managers to see where problems are coming from and how issues relate to one another.
DevOps offers a way out of this complexity trap. A value chain perspective decouples activities from an organizational funnel.
DevOps principles may apply throughout the value chain of one product but not another in big businesses with numerous distinct groups or product teams, providing these products are entirely independent of one another. Therefore, to claim that a specific software product complies with this standard, an organization or team must follow the concepts and practices in all parts of that product’s value chain.
DevOps enables and improves the Value Chain by automating tasks and integrating previously separate systems within an organization so operations.
Breaking Down Silos
Silos in your organization are everywhere, and they are toxic to the delivery of software. DevOps is about breaking down silos and creating cross-functional teams that can develop a level of shared ownership for a processor “flow”.
It is usual to see team members interact well with one another. However, operational silos would be naturally broken if the team included specialists across the full software delivery cycle.
Whether you realize it or not, you have silos in your organization. If you fix your end-to-end pipeline, then you will address the main goal behind DevOps.
DevOps efficiently reduces wait time and unnecessary rework. The absence of total ownership is a typical issue with segregated teams. It takes a few emails and phone calls to identify the responsible resource and allocate tasks as needed. Because a DevOps team is self-served and each team member is accountable, DevOps has avoided the headache of determining “who is responsible.”
Creating Cross-Functional Teams
A cross-functional software development team’s basic structure would include developers, testers, analysts, and system administrators.
Production software teams become overloaded and can’t produce software fast enough. Customers demand more and more, time goes by, and the team is under pressure.
There is no need to spend weeks in “analysis paralysis” while figuring out what features should go into your next release. Instead, experiment with small changes that can be released quickly yet still have a big impact on your customer experience. DevOps lets you do this!
One solution is creating cross-functional teams where the right people work together on delivering essential value to each customer segment. Ideally, the same people should work across the entire customer life cycle… from envisioning solutions to marketing them and supporting them over time.
Conclusion
Adopting the DevOps approach necessitates a fundamental shift throughout the organization.
The integration of the enterprise-scale DevOps mindset will break down silos, increasing the ability to deliver value to customers and produce software faster.
Such changes affect the whole IT value chain, not just development and operations teams. DevOps’ culture of continuous delivery helps shorten time to market, optimize the flow of value from idea to end-user and encourages collaboration creating cross-functional teams.
Quick Summary
- The gap between development and end-user delivery is huge, making it difficult to understand how the delivery of quality software is happening against the business goals.
- Enterprise DevOps teams have a goal: to optimize the flow of value from idea to end-user and assign value to any changes that we’re trying to make in an organization.
- The focus on speed and agility in DevOps is about how we develop software and how we operate as an organization. DevOps is about improving the value chain, breaking down silos and creating cross-functional teams.
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