Implement DevOps Practices That Work

Accelerate software deployment through Dev and Ops collaboration.

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Contributors

Stephen Elliott, SVP IT Innovation and Decision Optimization, Sedgwick
4 anonymous contributors

Your Challenge

In today’s world, business agility is essential to stay competitive. Quick responses to business needs through efficient development and deployment practices is critical for business value delivery.
Organizations are looking to DevOps as an approach to rapidly deliver changes, but they often lack the foundations to use DevOps effectively.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Be DevOps, rather than doing DevOps. DevOps is a philosophy, not an industry framework. Your organization’s culture must shift towards system-wide thinking, and cross-function collaboration and empathy.
Automation is just one piece of DevOps. Culture, learning, automation, integrated teams, and metrics and governance (CLAIM) are all critical components of effective DevOps.

Impact and Result

Use a value-driven approach to give a common vision for teams across silos and to translate the benefits of DevOps into a common language that each team and the business can understand.
Conduct brainstorming sessions to delve into customer, development, release, and application support challenges and implement approaches so that the business, development, and operations can collaboratively work together to provide a better customer experience and business value.
Structure a DevOps governance and metrics program that promotes collaboration, transparency, and empathy across teams; establishes appropriate roles and responsibilities; and ensures alignment to a common set of goals.
Define an implementation roadmap that considers the necessary competencies and capabilities, and their dependencies in moving towards the desired DevOps target state.

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement DevOps, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Implement DevOps Practices That Work – Executive Brief

1. Establish your organizational fit with DevOps

Conduct an assessment of your organization’s current state and understand if you are ready to start your DevOps journey.

2. Brainstorm your desired DevOps capabilities

Identify the root causes of your organization’s current challenges and conduct a cross-functional brainstorming session for collaborative responses to the challenges.

3. Structure your DevOps environment

Conduct a gap analysis between your current state and your DevOps capability matrix, and strategize the most effective methods to fill those gaps in your organization.

4. Create your DevOps roadmap

Define an achievable DevOps adoption roadmap.

Guided Implementations

This guided implementation is a nine call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Establish your organizational fit with DevOps

Call #1 - Understand what DevOps really is.

Call #2 - Determine if DevOps is right for you.

Guided Implementation #2 - Brainstorm your desired DevOps capabilities

Call #1 - Find the root causes of your current challenges.

Call #2 - Define your DevOps capabilities.

Guided Implementation #3 - Structure your DevOps environment

Call #1 - Construct your organizational target state.

Call #2 - Structure your target state processes and tools.

Call #3 - Create a DevOps metrics program.

Guided Implementation #4 - Create your DevOps roadmap

Call #1 - Categorize your DevOps initiatives.

Call #2 - Structure your DevOps roadmap.

Book Your Workshop

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Establish Your Organizational Fit With DevOps

The Purpose

Build the case for DevOps.
Understand any current issues that are affecting your development and operations processes and teams.
Understand the organizational prerequisites for beginning a DevOps transformation.

Key Benefits Achieved

List the goals and objectives of your organization and identify how DevOps will achieve them.
A comprehensive analysis of your current state to identify key challenges.
A high-level readiness assessment that indicates what steps need to be taken prior to beginning a DevOps transformation.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Understand the value of DevOps.

Goals and objectives of your DevOps adoption.

1.2

Determine the fit for DevOps.

Current state analysis to identify DevOps opportunities.

Module 2: Brainstorm Your Desired DevOps Capabilities

The Purpose

Find the root causes of your current challenges.
Identify current customer, product, and business needs and challenges.
Brainstorm DevOps capabilities to address customer, product, and business needs and challenges.

Key Benefits Achieved

A deep understanding of where current challenges originate.
A shift in perspective towards a value-centric view of product delivery.
A defined set of DevOps capabilities to address your needs and challenges.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Root cause your current challenges.

Root cause of current delivery and product challenges.

2.2

Develop your DevOps capabilities.

List of DevOps capabilities aligned to your target state topography.

Module 3: Structure Your DevOps Environment

The Purpose

Identify the gaps between your current state and your desired DevOps capabilities and strategize ways to fill them.
Structure a metrics program to promote empathy and alignment across your teams.

Key Benefits Achieved

Re-structured governance and organizational design to sync with your desired DevOps capabilities.
Optimization of your current DevOps processes and tools.
Creation of a DevOps metrics program.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Fill competency and governance gaps.

Approaches to address competency and governance gaps.

3.2

Map your target state process and tools.

Target state product delivery process and tools with DevOps.

3.3

Structure a DevOps metrics program.

List of metrics to gauge DevOps success.

Module 4: Create Your DevOps Roadmap

The Purpose

Develop a roadmap to implement your new capabilities and associated changes.

Key Benefits Achieved

A well-defined and structured roadmap based on a best-practice prioritization schema.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Create your DevOps roadmap.

DevOps adoption roadmap.

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this Blueprint, and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Apega

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

very useful. Enjoyed the time, found some useful info that will help me move forward.

Statistics New Zealand

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

Government Employees Health Association Inc

Guided Implementation

10/10

$33,091

Great interaction and exchange of ideas.

University Of Regina

Guided Implementation

9/10

$25,000

Hans was a perfect fit for the level of discussion I wanted to have. I will schedule a follow up call to discuss appropriate org models, skills, culture, and so forth. The worst part, if you want to call it that, was that we eventually ran out of time. Easily solved.

Hamilton Health Sciences

Guided Implementation

1/10

N/A

the analyst was unprepared and provided no structured materials for discussion, the call was ended short due to lack of value

Sherritt International Corporation

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

The analyst was well prepared and knowledgeable on the topic being discussed, however after discussing DevOps with him, I don't think it is what we are looking to implement quite yet. As an organization we don't have the processes in place that a DevOps model provides.

Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada

Guided Implementation

7/10

$8,000

My team didn't realize that we should have reviewed the material in advance. If we had done that, I think we would have derived more value from this call. I think the material looks very good - we just didn't prepare properly to engage on some of the points that would be more pertinent to us.

Armed Forces Benefit Association

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Very knowledgeable analyst, gave us lots to think about regarding a DevOps implementation.

Job and Family Services

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

YMCA of Central Florida

Workshop

10/10

N/A

Multnomah County

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

CF Industries Enterprises Inc

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Station Casinos

Workshop

6/10

N/A

BEST: Information and collaboration was good. WORST: Organization of training was a bit disjointed, but some of that was our fault.

Centura Health

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Was valuable to hear thoughts around environment management tools, and to vette the process we are Ling through to select our tools. I think i could have been more thoughtful about choosing this, as it turned out my interest was not in the full picture of DevOps but in the environment management tools.

CenterPoint Energy

Guided Implementation

8/10

$99,274

Both the content provided in the research materials and the conference call to discuss the topic were very beneficial. The worst part is this was a very complex and diverse topic, have to recognize it as a introductory call to establish base of understanding.

Statistics New Zealand

Guided Implementation

8/10

$33,091

N/A

Good to know how others are implementing it. The people know what DevOps is but the inertia and culture is the friction slowing down its adoption. Perhaps it is the policies that stops people taking action. Hence the analyst call is get a realistic picture what others are doing.

First National Bank - Card IT

Guided Implementation

10/10

$99,274

International Flavors & Fragrances Inc

Guided Implementation

6/10

N/A

Limited articles written on topic of cloud governance to date.

Vision Critical Communications Inc

Workshop

6/10

N/A

the roadmap and a few of the artifacts were very useful; a couple of the exercises yielded lower value than others

Pyrotek, Inc.

Guided Implementation

6/10

$2,647

Great overview information, and explanation - also got some ideas for how to improve and/or measure our application development process

FX Innovation

Guided Implementation

6/10

$5,000

N/A

Well prepared. Answered all of my questions.

Toronto District School Board

Guided Implementation

1/10

N/A

I cannot rate the experience at this stage as we have not embarked on the journey yet. However, the conversation with the analyst was very valuable and validated our position as far as our own research and skills are concerned on the subject of DevOps. .