DevOps assessment - how to measure your maturity

When a company wants to implement the devOps philosophy it has to measure its maturity to have a snapshot of its IT (people, process & tools), and create a trajectory regarding this snapshot to plan its DevOps journey.

To align an entire company and manage a big transformation, we need a vision of the target, a breadcrumb. Most of the time, the vision is set in a top-down approach (not very Agile but mandatory to align the middle management and pilot the program). One of the most important thing in a transformation is the change management, the way you gather people around the same goals. Planning a trajectory doesn't mean that you won't be able to adapt and change the plans... it's giving a direction, everyone in the same boat.

A good way to evaluate the DevOps maturity, and imply people, is to have a bottom-up approach : teams auto-assess themselves and find the way to improve regarding the company goals. Then, after tracing the trajectory, you will have a better implication of all the actors cause they were part of the project from the beginning.

My goal here is to present you a DevOps assessment matrix which can be useful to evaluatue your DevOps maturity. You can find a lot of DevOps assessments on the internet. The one I'm presenting you was created after a lot of iterations with teams from many industries and companies.

Here are the 4 pilars of the assessment :

• Culture : create and share a common culture between dev & ops, build & run.
• Automation : limit the errors to create reliability and stability during the process.
• Measure : define, collect, mix & analyze technical / business / product metrics.
• Sharing : create collaboration between teams to meet the common goals.

For every pilar you must focus on some key operationnal axis. In my opinion, here are the main axis to focus on.

CULTURE

Culture is the main part of the devOps philosophy. You have to answer the following questions when assessing your teams :

• Are my teams unified and extensive ?
• Do we have the DevOps values ?
• Is there a climate of transparency ? A culture of failure acceptance ?
• Are we user centric ? Are our decisions taken form the customer perspectives ?
• Do we try to improve our practices regularly ? Can we delete the wastes of time ?
• Is my organization siloed ?
• Do we master the processes ?
• Are we focused on technical excellence ?
• Are tests and security left-shifted in the life cycle ?

AUTOMATION

Automation is the most well known pilar of DevOps. Even if it's less important than the "Culture" one, the Automation pilar is a key accelerator. Here are the technical practices you can focus on :

• Repetitive and low value-added tasks automation
• Test automation (unit / regression / functionnal / integration, security...)
• Continuous integration
• Continuous deployment
• Cloud and application architecture
• Incident management
• Reliability
• Scalability
• Reduced cycle time, fast delivery process

SHARING

Sharing is one of the key to make people collaborate. Here are the points you can focus on :

• Common rituals and process
• Knowledge management
• Common tools
• Co-building, shared responsabilities
• Shared goals

Measure

Metrics will help you to evaluate some key indicators and measure the impacts of changes. Here are the points you can focus on :

• Common metrics between every team members
• Technical debt, code quality
• Product and business metrics
• Way to collect, store and display data
• Data analysis

As you can see, there is a lot of axis to focus on to have an overview of your devops journey. For every axis, you need to create 3 to 4 levels of maturity to formalize your goals in every field. That way, you will able to pilot the transformation and the teams will be able to evaluate themselves.

When you have measured the maturity of each teams you can gather the informations in radar graphs to have a picture of the devOps maturiy. For example :

Now that you have an overview of your maturity, you can plan actions to help your teams upgrading their maturity regarding your company's goals, and pilot the overall transformation.

I developped a full DevOps assessment with levels of maturity and what's expected at every level. Ask for more details !