Platform Engineering Beyond the Tech Stack

Over many years of consulting, I’ve worked with numerous organisations operating in complex, hybrid IT environments. Most have a traditional IT Operations foundation, spread across on-premises and multi-cloud setups. While there are often pockets of agility or development capability, these practices are rarely integrated across the organisation as a whole.

I’ve seen first-hand how difficult it can be for such organisations to adopt modern ways of working in a sustained way. In a previous article, From Anti-Patterns to Evolutionary PlatformOps, I explored how organisations evolve through different DevOps topologies.

Now that Platform Engineering as a discipline has gained momentum and is bringing more clarity to the how from a technology and platform perspective;  it feels like the right time to expand the conversation.

Where platforms struggle in practice

Platforms do not exist in isolation. They rely on, enable, and constrain one another, and their success is shaped as much by organisational, operational, and governance dependencies as by the technology they contain.

Yet change or transformation often happens in pockets;  and the same pattern is now emerging with Platform Engineering.

 To be clear, starting small or improving incrementally is not the issue. The problem arises when initiatives start small without considering the bigger picture. This becomes even more critical when organisations begin planning Platform Engineering efforts or introducing an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).

Evolutionary vs. big-bang transformation

A common question I get is how the evolutionary approach I talk about for PlatformOps differs from “big-bang” transformation.  The truth is: it doesn’t — because they are two different things.

Transformation has lost some of its meaning in many circles, often reduced to labels and semantics. At its core, transformation is about change with intent: moving from one state to another, guided by a vision of where you want to be.

Evolution, on the other hand, is about making change a constant.

Platforms cannot transform once and be “done”. They must continually adapt, modernise, and evolve, because the organisation, the technology, and the ecosystem around them never stand still. This will not happen unless the conditions that allow platforms to evolve are deliberately put in place.

DevOps & demystifying the “X” in XaaS

I regularly see attempts to mimic XaaS (“as-a-service”) models without reflecting on context or on the actual services that are needed.

Even when the intent is to create services (platform services, but services nonetheless), What tends to happen is one (or more) of the following:

• Platform as a product is brought up, but Product management concepts are introduced without being adapted for 'platform' contexts
• Service management forces existing models onto platforms, even when they don’t fit
• Service management and product management never meaningfully meet
• Service design (the discipline- not the ITILV3 book) is not considered in the context of platforms, even though what are being designed are 'services'
• A capable and willing ITSM function (sometimes the case) is treated as irrelevant or alien to Platform Engineering, Platform-as-Product, or DevOps work.
• Despite DevOps being widely recognised as necessary, it is still often not applied at the platform level ;  particularly true for foundational or shared services platforms.

Ultimately, there is little clarity on how to build the bridge and make all of this work together.

I’ve now finally written a paper entitled Platform Engineering: Conditions for Success. It brings together years of hands-on experience to explore why platform initiatives succeed or stall in complex organisations. It looks at internal platforms as systems of value, the realities of platform landscapes, and the conditions required to sustain adaptability, flow, and alignment over time.

The paper acts as a reference point for the considerations I bring to my work, and offers insight into how I approach Platform Engineering, PlatformOps, and platform-led transformation in practice.

You can read the full paper on my website: https://valuecraftstudio.com/platform-engineering-1

If you’d like a copy of the file, feel free to reach out — I’m happy to share it.