Is your DevOps Journey heading the right way?
It’s been over a decade since the DevOps movement first started, and the practice of software delivery has come a long way. The DevOps transformation journey begins with focusing on a Continuous Delivery practice that can deliver software in a fast, safe, reliable, and repeatable way.
When planning for a transformational journey, one imagines that the journey will be linear and smooth. 
As we begin the DevOps journey, things will not appear so simple as we had imagined they would be. There will be many challenges that we would need to face. There will be many hurdles to overcome. 
Current State: Calibrations and Assessments
Like a sailor using a compass to calibrate the ship’s direction, organizations need to reassess their journey at every checkpoint. It’s essential to ensure that our journey is on track and is heading in the right direction. But, unfortunately, we have seen organizations making mistakes that never allow them to reach their target goal or full potential.
Risks :
With the advent of automation tools, organizations are automating stages in a CICD pipeline to deliver software fast. Unfortunately, the DevOps toolchain can become complex and unwieldy. Plugging in quick fix platforms and automation to your existing system might later become a nightmare for the development and testing team. This change is going to affect enterprises and needs to be treated with utmost importance. An improper implementation will lead to further constraints in the system. . It will further aggravate into an increased overhead cost and additional utilization of resources. In the end, organizations move away from the goal of faster delivering unknowingly.
Need for calibrations and assessments :
An assessment helps the organization get back on track because it will highlight the organization’s current state, and it will also highlight the potential for improvement. Having a clear and aligned view of the issues faced by the organization helps prioritize the best steps to tackle first. It also gives everyone a voice in the change, which increases the chance of success.
Benefits from an assessment
Organizations stand to achieve better product quality, reliable releases, faster time to market, improved team collaboration, and reduced costs if a CICD is implemented the right way and with the right approach by setting up the foundations first.
An assessment will provide organizations with visibility into their processes which will help them in many ways. Some of them are:
- Exposé of current silos in the organization
- Bottlenecks in a software delivery pipeline that can be automated
- Productivity improvement opportunities for the whole team involved in the delivery journey
Added benefits from expert assessments
Self-assessments are an excellent way to begin the transformative journey, but they may result in a myopic view of the system regarding technology and process. With the help of experts, they can unlock further benefits by getting insights, recommendations, and best practices that can transcend their deployment process to the next level of efficiency and quality.
The Recommendations may not be limited only to the following items.
- A pipeline of low-hanging fruits that the organizations can perform to achieve instant benefits.
- Detailed and customized roadmaps for CICD implementation and possible alternatives as well.
- A set of catalogs of recommendations on time-bound & Cost-effective tools based on the current processes practiced within the organization.
An audit report from experts will enable stakeholders to plan and implement proper practices & tools to make their teams competent & competitive. We at OpsMx take a step further and provide estimates on your return on investment as well. We can do this because of our experience in helping many organizations achieve that ideal CICD process.
Outcomes from an Assessments
Tangible outcomes can be realized within days taking the first step towards CICD modernization. Here is a list of results the organizations achieve at a minimum.
- On-demand multiple deployments a day.
- Lead time for changes reduced to less than a day.
- Restoration from failed deployments within minutes
- Increased collaboration between departments
- Improved quality and performance of the application
- Reduced time to market
- Reduction in spending on development, testing & operations
- Lean teams developing & deploying software (due to automation)
- Reduced IT infrastructure costs
The OpsMx advantage for your DevOps journey
Many of our customers reached out to us with various issues they were facing with their existing CICD process. Some of them had trouble with delivery speeds, whereas others were worried about security issues and rising costs. Some were worried about a modernizing risk that made them nervous about adopting a new CICD journey. Read about these stories here on how we tackled these issues from them.
Read about these stories here on how we tackled these issues from them.
Before we jump into the process of CICD modernization, we always assess their state and capability, as the assessment unearths the gaps within the organization concerning their CI-CD practices. This is achieved by asking the right questions to the right people. The stakeholders would provide information on all the questions. When these answers seem insufficient, there will always be multiple rounds of follow-up questions before we start to carefully analyze and gauge the current state of the CI-CD process.
DevOps Assessment Process Map
The assessment helps us to understand the stage of the CICD journey the customer is in. This will allow us to take appropriate steps to guide them through the end of their ideal CICD journey.
Do outcomes matter Image Source: IT Matters Once Again
Our approach focuses on outcomes rather than on outputs. By focusing on a capabilities paradigm, organizations can continuously drive improvement. And by focusing on the right capabilities, organizations can drive improvements in their outcomes, allowing them to develop and deliver software with improved speed and stability.
Outputs lead to outcomes, but we make sure that success is measured on outcomes and not outputs. Let us understand this using the four most important metrics( as per the DORA DevOps 2019 Report) that capture the effectiveness of the DevOps CICD Process.
Output to Outcome
Are you ready to transcend your CI/CD process?
Our audit is based on the DevOps capability assessment of the organization. We run different ROI scenarios and conduct what-if analysis to expose salient points and productivity improvement opportunities. At the end of the engagement, you would have a definite knowledge of how sound your plan is, your technical capability, and the competitive threats and options to optimize your plans.
Today technology is moving at breakneck speed, and we at OpsMx understand how crucial each minute is. Reach out to us and let us help you achieve the software development lifecycle you have always envisioned.
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