To date, software releases have generally been monolithic, infrequent, and disruptive, resulting in finger-pointing and misunderstanding between the respective Product Management, Development, Quality Assurance, Security, Networking, and Operations teams.
These long release cycles also tend to leave the customers wanting more or feeling unheard or unseen. Some organizations find their product and service scores lacking. Some find their customer NPS scores leave much to be desired.
There’s been much investment into more agile DevOps and DevSecOps programs to make the process and releases more streamlined, frequent, and impactful. Still, many organizations find this transformation to DevOps maturity a constant challenge. Not just internally but also when connecting external feedback to the internal processes.
How does the DevOps program address the customer need in a way that matters internally and to your customers?
To tackle this multi-faceted challenge, many organizations are looking for ways to increase the software release tempo in response to:
- User feedback on features and capabilities
- Signs that the end-to-end customer experience (UX) needs improvement
- Business drivers to deliver more value in the product or service to increase revenue
- Gain in the share of voice and improve NPS scores to grow market share
To bring this cycle of requirements-to-delivery full circle, your DevOps program needs to distinguish actionable methods to improve your software delivery and operations (SDO) maturity. Below are a few objectives to help define your DevOps strategy and planning.
Increase deployment frequency
For your brand-differentiating and revenue-generating applications or services, you want to deploy code to production “at will.” Instead of releasing a new offering a couple of times a year, look to deploy updates or new features as often as a couple of times each day.
Reduce “lead time for changes”
Another objective is trimming the time between code being committed and code successfully running in production. Where traditional programs find it takes weeks or days, elite performance closes this gap to less than one hour.
Minimize “time to restore service”
For the primary application or service, how long does it generally take your team to restore a customer-impacting service when an incident or a defect, such as an unplanned outage or service impairment? High-performing teams experience a timeframe between a day and a week. Elite performance comes in with less than one hour between the two markers.
Reduce “change failure rate”
For the primary application or service, what percentage of changes to production result in degraded service, service impairment, or service outage? Do any outages subsequently require remediations such as a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, or patch? The elite performance benchmark for this objective is routinely demonstrated within the 0% to 15% range. The rest of the industry typically operates within the 16% to 30% range.
Maturity Calculated through ROI
The outcomes from maturity should be measurable. This is where a DevOps ROI comes into play, assessing the impact of maturity on expenses, risk, and revenue.
With Taos DevOps Now, your program can benefit from reductions in:
- Site reliability engineers and cloud engineers
- Unnecessary application or service rework
- Delays in release cycles and timelines
- Timeframes between code commits and production deployments
- Outages and related repair and recovery costs
- Exposure to cyber threats and breach likelihood
With these reductions, your mature program can begin to reinvest these savings in time, team, and funds to:
- Test new features and evaluate customer experience more frequently
- Add fresh, validated product features more often
- Extend business offerings and create new business units
- Increase business revenue and market share
- Demonstrate the value of the program in line with the business objectives
Taos DevOps Now will Mature Your SDO—What’s Your ROI?
We invite you to consider working with us to employ DevOpsNow to improve your SDO maturity with the right-sized software delivery model that supports your brand-differentiating and revenue-generating applications.
Take five minutes to learn more and compute your DevOps Now ROI at https://www.taos.com/managed_services/devops-now-roi-calculator/