DevOps Maturity Assessment - POV

As I keep seeing all the time in this digital age, people are still figuring out “What is DevOps / DevSecOps / NoOps / DevTestOps etc?”, there is a good another half who have embraced it the journey with their DevOps.

But even from those who have already embraced DevOps journey, there are few really who are exploring “What are the low hanging fruits? How do we measure what we have achieved? How do we assess the maturity level of our DevOps? How to translate those assessments into numbers to make sense to CIOs and CFOs?”.

The answer to about could have been with DevOps Maturity Assessment followed by Value Business Case. The Value Business Case which I believe should also account for both intangible benefits of DevOps are in equal proportion to the tangible ones. So, when I look to assess the benefits of doing DevOps, I evaluate the value from intangible and tangible ones. This is what I assessed in my first assessment with one of the largest digital manufacturing company for their large enterprise transformation. 

To explain more on this journey, I with my few colleagues conducted several assessment workshop with all the work streams and gathered information in these areas:

Step 1: DevOps Basic Information Scoring:

1. Establish Team
2. Establish Goals and Vision
3. Establish the Product Backlog
4. Understand Stakeholder Involvement
5. Setup Project Environment
6. Agree Definition of Ready (DoR)
7. Agree Definition of Done (DoD)
8. Create Initial Architecture
9. Identify Risks and Mitigation Strategies
10. Define Engineering Standards
11. Produce and Agree Release Level Schedule
12. Refine Product Backlog
13. Plan Iteration
14. Build Iteration Backlog Items
15. Test Product Increment
16. Conduct Daily Stand Up Meeting
17. Measure
18. Conduct Iteration Review
19. Conduct Iteration Retrospective 

Step 2: Service Management Scoring:

1. Release & Change Management
2. Incident Management
3. Problem Management
4.  Security & Risk Management
5. Transition Management
6. Capacity Management

Step 3: DevOps Scoring:

1. Configuration Management
2. Continuous Integration
3. Continuous Testing
4. Continuous Delivery
5. Continuous Monitoring
6. Environment Provisioning

Step 4 DevOps Value Business Case:

Deriving Value Business Case, following were few areas of information which I gathered

Tangible (Key Ones):

1. Effort Savings (Build & Release, Deployment, Testing etc)
2. Software Cost Savings (making redundant / open source / sunset tools)
3. Reduced FTE
4. Reduced Infrastructure

Intangible (Key Ones):

1. Productivity
2. Faster Communication
3. Faster Decision Making
4. High Team Morale

This approach model will definitely will help you assess the landscape allowing you to find the gaps in the process/tools/people and helping you to provide best possible solution for filling the gaps identified.

Another important thought to carry along while reading this blog would be to bear in mind a fact that the value of DevOps or its benefits, could be vastly different from person to person. While for a Project Manager, it could simply mean how much efficiency and quality improvement it added to the release, Operations Managers would want to assess from the ease of deployment, a CIO may focus on application uptime and performance while CFO may be interested in cost savings etc.

There are ways and such tools available which can run agents on various machines to capture such data which will help in devising benefits of DevOps, but caution should be taken in choosing them as they are far too many and a lot of data collected from those tools is certainly not going to help in finding the answers, rather they will only add to the confusion. Before looking for any such tool, very carefully and with diligence, efforts should be made to identify the metrics which are of value to the person or group who is seeking evaluation. I’ll make an attempt to discuss few such tools and strategies in my next article.

Lastly, the benchmarks value captured in the entire process will help you to measure the effectiveness of DevOps adoption eventually and would be able to answer the questions asked initially which were “What are the low hanging fruits? How do we measure what we have achieved? How do we assess the maturity level of our DevOps? How to translate those assessments into numbers to make sense to CIOs and CFOs?”.

Please do reach out to me in case you need any assistance / guidance in your journey.