Developing, delivering and operating software to retain talent and increase revenue growth

The Visma Cloud Delivery Model (VCDM) is the recommended way of developing, delivering and operating cloud software in Visma - but it's up to each team or company to decide to align with this way of working.

Aligning with VCDM includes taking full advantage of the Visma Security Program which provides many types of security testing tools, intelligence services, personal guidance, and more.

Similarly, working according to VCDM means using most of the Visma Architecture & Technology Program: Attaining the capabilities necessary to deliver changes to Production quickly and frequently, making sure your public cloud architecture is secure, reliable, scalable and cost efficient, having a disaster recovery plan in case of failure, etc.

Finally, VCDM includes some strong opinions on how effective development teams should be organized: Dev, test and ops should not be organized separately. Instead, we should have cross-functional and autonomous team who have full and exclusive ownership and responsibility for their Visma product (or a well-defined part of a Visma product). This way, we avoid organizational dependencies and handovers which slows us down.

VCDM also has some high level processes that all teams follow, like for Incident Management. We stress how engineering performance drives commercial performance, and we focus a lot on continuous improvement. Everything in VCDM is aligned with continuous delivery of customer value in mind. It has to be easy and cheap to experiment, learn and put product improvements in front of users. And we see that we're improving.

Today, around 80 of our teams have chosen to align with this way of working, and many more are on the way. The VCDM team is constantly working to help more Visma teams and companies to align with VCDM, while also continuously improving VCDM itself based on industry developments, feedback from our users, and our own experiences. We are happy to see that the teams that have chosen to align with VCDM feel that it's valuable:

Some of the most recent comments:

• "Extremely helpful and very professional. I'm recommending VCDM to everybody. The improvements are constant and good. Overall the experience gained are invaluable both from a project perspective and also as a software industry professional."
• "VCDM framework is no doubt a super valuable framework for being able to deliver and operate software in Visma. Our team has learned a lot from it and become a stronger software delivery team after on-boarding. We have also seen huge value of being an autonomous team taking full responsibility of our service as we have tried other approaches previously”
• "I look at the VCDM as a set of guidelines and in our case it helped us to think a bit more about our solution and also helped to make it more secure and reliable."
• "VCDM really helps with security processes, also customers are impressed with the indexes etc. Its great that we get pointers to the right direction in all areas of modern software development.”
• "It makes us all follow the same procedures, the reviews make us think and evaluate our system and maybe come up with better solutions. We can get inspiration from others trying to solve a problem, because all teams follow the same process"
• "VCDM helps us to be more confident in our service. We have found out some areas to improve like security."

Looking closer at revenue and employee engagement, we also see positive news.

While we cannot say that these effects are caused by VCDM (correlation, not causation), we can definitely say that most employees prefer working in modern ways with modern technology, and both of these factors are likely to result in better products that are preferred by our customers.