You’re done with missed release deadlines, long release cycles and risky releases. If your objectives are continuous application delivery to achieve fast feedback loops and reduced waste, DevOps practices provide the means to reach them.
DevOps is all about agile transformation, which reaches beyond agile development into production to achieve continuous delivery. DevOps practices provide help for the necessary next step after agile development to leverage the full potential of agile and avoid massive post-delivery changes through the development teams, but before they are ready to go into production.
The challenge is to navigate that DevOps transformation—and make it happen faster and at less risk. The speed and direction of that transformation depends on individual circumstances—for example, the type of technology you have deployed, the shape of your organization structure and processes, and what your overriding business and IT requirements are.
Beginning the Transformation Journey
Only once you have assessed your organization’s current DevOps maturity and orientation can you begin to scale your DevOps implementation—and move faster on the transformative journey toward continuous delivery. In other words, to know where you’re going, you need to know where you are now.
By measuring your status across each of these dimensions on a scale of Level 0 and Level 4 (see diagram), you can benchmark where you are today and derive recommendations and measures for future improvements.
Culture and Strategy: DevOps requires a strong vision and strategy and its success will depend on the awareness, knowledge, skills and motivation of your employees. This pillar addresses the effectiveness and alignment of your awareness-building and enablement programs as well as your incentivation system with regard to agility in all involved units, dev and ops. It also includes a snapshot of the sentiment and motivation of people to make such a change reality.
Automation: This pillar addresses the maturity of your organization in terms of IT automation as an important prerequisite for continuous delivery. Both the application architecture and the DevOps automation tool chain are assessed. Relevant automation capabilities in application configuration, provisioning, deployment, test, infrastructure and application monitoring are included in the assessment. The maturity is assessed across the tree layers infrastructure, platform and application, and by technology stack—for example, your SAP platform, .NET or Java stacks—and then combined into a single level.
Structure and Processes: The current organizational structure and methodologies and processes in use within all involved units are assessed with regard to their effectiveness for continuous delivery. This focuses on their agile fit and maturity. Governance and how agile teams and processes are embedded into the broader organization are part of the assessment scope as well.
Collaboration and Sharing: Collaboration and sharing between development, operations, infrastructure and middleware teams are crucial to accelerate the delivery process and make it leaner. The assessment looks at particular sharing vs. redundancy of tools (e.g., tools used for deployment), information (e.g., the status of a package in the delivery pipeline), processes (e.g., an ITIL release process and a development release process) and functions (e.g., a release engineer in development and a deployment expert in production).
Now you have the facts at your fingertips. The DevOps Maturity Assessment Service presents all of this as documented findings, to include a series of recommendations on how you can scale and mature your DevOps activity.
