DevOps - Measuring Success

So you have decided to implement a DevOps solution such as Plan, Build, Run…but how do you know that your organization has improved? In this article, I mention four different (but not the only!) ways in which you can tell organizational improvement in the DevOps area. If you see these four improvements taking place in your organization, you are most likely seeing the business acting more quickly to market changes, as well as increasing the overall effectiveness of IT within the organization.

Bottlenecks Removed

             One of the first things that should happen on your team is that Work In Progress does not get stuck at a single station, or with a single person. If you continue to see your work being filtered to a certain person or team, and it is slowing down the business, you should address this concern immediately. In many organizations, there is a single person that multiple individuals will go to, asking them to do work, without using the proper channels. When this happens, it deters from the other work that should be taking place, both internally and with business partners. When work is organized in the proper way and placed through the proper channels, you find that the work the business needs to get done is done much more quickly.

Shared Knowledge

As you continue to remove bottlenecks within your organization, you will find that the way knowledge is shared among individuals and within teams is improved. The idea behind this is that as bottlenecks are removed and the types of work are organized and prioritized, more individuals will become involved. The sharing of knowledge will also continue to improve as technology teams become better aligned with the business. Technology teams will better understand what goals the business is trying to obtain, and that will place them in a position to provide services that make sense for the business. Overall, you should see improvement in the sharing of knowledge, making all members of teams better aligned and more productive.  

Faster Releases To Production

As you move to a more agile, predictable environment, a couple of different internal practices should improve. The time to market within your environment should improve, due to change management and automation. Developers should be able to spin up production like environments, develop and test their code, and ensure that when a change is entered it does not affect anything else in the environment. Another area of improvement is the reduction in the number of handoffs. With business partners and technology professionals working together, the time it takes to build or correct technology solutions should improve. Lastly, in a DevOps environment, instead of implementing large projects that most likely will never meet given dates, projects can be carved into smaller pieces that can be implemented. While this will not work for every project, especially with applications in a legacy environment, when applicable it gives the business and technology a better chance at success. As you continue to improve in DevOps, you should see your organization moving in this direction.  

Fewer Issues Called In

It should correlate that as IT and business partners work closely together, the number of issues that are called in should decrease. Product requirements and what is delivered should be more closely aligned. Also, being able to spin up production like environments quickly for testing should ensure that any business tool that is created and released does not affect other tools in the environment. Monitor incidents that are opened in your environment for DevOps tools that are released, and you should see (hopefully!) a decrease in those incidents.

Moving Toward DevOps

We all know that taking a large organization and steering it down the DevOps path is a change that will take a long time. It is also something, as I have written previously, that will not fit in every single piece of your environment. But moving in the DevOps direction will certainly help your IT department to empower the business by being more quick and agile to competitive changes. Also, adopting more of a DevOps approach will help the business understand that IT is not just a hole to throw money down, but is a true business partner.