DevOps Through Metrics

As a technology industry focusing on DevOps ways of working and cloud solution, we typically have viable solutions to most challenges our customers face.

So why are we not resolving the constraints?

Context

Some experience I had today:

My client note that they struggle to do their daily work due to the inconsistent performance of their VPN. Raising a call result in the support team simply checking that the connection is up, leaving the underlying problem unresolved. Difficult scenario to report, difficult to resolve.

The same is true with distributed systems, databases, infrastructure and most other components forming part of modern solutions. Unfortunately the same is true for software delivery, quality assurance and support.

Through the use of metrics and tracing, the technical components are easily quantified, prioritised and resolved. For software delivery, we turn to the main pillar of Lean, namely Flow Time!

Flow Time

Flow time is a measure of how long something took to do from beginning to end.

We know by reducing the flow time, we will make stakeholders and customers happy, the way we go about the change makes all the difference.

Flow Efficiency

Let’s use the metrics and calculate the efficiency.

Flow efficiency will provide us with a clear metric to improve, and guiding all future decisions. Not only does any improvement to the efficiency have a cumulative effect on delivery, but is also the only approach that has proven to deliver sustainable business results.

Image a flow efficiency of 30%. It means that:

• 70% of the time and money is wasted
• 30% of peoples’ time is spent delivering value

Using techniques such as automation, pipelines, databases, cloud, quality and observability, it would be quite simple to increase the flow efficiency to 60%. Not only does it provide a better approach to ROI, but improvements are approached in a calculated and demonstrable manner.

Approach

Keeping in mind that DevOps is a business problem and not just an IT problem, we can use flow efficiency to guide our ongoing improvement efforts.

Good decisions are made only when you have good metrics.