Lead Time vs No Of Deployments

 In the last few months, I had discussion with many organisations which are on their way to start transformation or already mid-way through on measuring the success. One thing common which I found that every one of those has no. of deployment in production as one of their primary metrics for measuring the agility and success on their journey. And with the further discussion, I could find that they have a good CICD implementation which gives them a very fast way to develop and deploy capabilities and see what their impact is which results in very fast cycle time but actually that’s embedded into a value stream which is typically long among other things. Lead time for implementation for a decision took long while the action is happening quickly. Lead time for a decision and implementation is out of sync with lead time for a change

Although there is no doubt that deploying to production faster allows to get faster feedback but According to me, organizations should focus on the Lead time as their primary metrics for movement in the digital transformation journey as getting down on the ground ahead of the pack gives a definite advantage. The faster you gear up, the better you'll do which means that faster you convert your thoughts or idea to a product you will have better chances of winning.

So question is why lead time is long, Actually Before they start developing any capability they have to work on design, investment decisions have to make, impact analysis needs to be done, need to set up the right team and other processes and more importantly forecasts for return on investment, and all this is done to ensure that the organization makes the right decision. All these time-consuming checks and balances are in place to investigate whether the investment is going into the right initiative or not.

In Agile and DevOps world, it is entirely possible to start deploying capabilities in very early phases to reach an objective. Hence you get feedback in early phase itself and then as soon as you start getting diminishing returns you can redirect your investments somewhere else. So by moving into execution quickly with the right control and right process we can do a much better job of fine-tuning our investment so that we can be assured that it's going to the right place we can constantly manage our risks and constantly reassess them. So in the process of adapting to change as we learn about it, we can do a much better job in meeting the organization’s big goals that are intended by the big upfront process of risk assessment. 

To conclude, Deploying faster and multiple times is not the whole story, Organisations who wants to deliver value faster, get to market ahead of the competition, and continuously improve the customer experience need to focus on their lead time improvement as well.