DevOps - Be Parsimonious rather than being Profligate.
As a DevOps Professional and a Technical leader, expecting more from DevOps, How do you define your roadmap to DevOps Maturity? What Data, Measures and Metrics drive your Roadmap? What specific challenges / issues you plan to address in your next iteration to further improve DevOps maturity (and business outcome)?
One of the Key challenge you must focus next is, Waste & Accumulated Waste.
How much effort / time it takes for each development bundle / feature to flow from Development … to Production?
Consider 2 independent software product development teams at work. Let’s take a dig at the information harvested from usage of their disparate CI/CD tools. What insights do you derive from enclosed picture?
- Why Team-1’s average commit cycle is lesser compared to Team-2? Is Team-2’s work more difficult? If not, Are they experimenting more? ….. OR is there lot of intermediate Waste?
- Is Unplanned Work or Rework causing delay in Staging or Production deployment? Is this due to wrong measures of Quality and Priority?
Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste. - Eric Ries
Focus on continuous diligent assessment to account for the Wastes & save every penny. Any
- Idle & Additional RESOURCE, be it Manpower or Money
- Unused Code / Unplanned work / Rework
- Unnecessary feature
- Defect
- Rising Technical Debt
in the use of resources is a WASTE.
Broadening your Vision, Waste also impacts team's progress. So, when you reduce Waste, you also "Do More with Less". That is why, Managing / controlling and Monitoring Waste is the 1’st Key step.
In brief, Managing 'Waste' en-route 'Commit to Deployment' cycle is critical in ensuring the requisite Cycle Time & Flow of Value across environments.
Questions to ponder – HOW TO:
- Identify & Define Waste in your environment.
- Continuously plan & improve 'Waste Visibility' to gain valuable insights for removing wastes ?
- How current practices and tool-usage generate Waste Indications & trends?
How to Win the fight against Waste ?
If we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.- Jim Barksdale
Solution is to remove firewalls between each Team’s CI/CD disparate tool usage and get layered integrated views for Team Leader, Business Leaders and Executives. Above screenshot is one such view meant in this case for Technical Leader.
N.B: As part of the Beta release of DevOps Maturity Workbench we have been extra careful to avoid Waste. At the same time, we also know that things may need to change, and we must be agile while we work on next Beta release. Hence, differentiating Waste from Experimentation is also among our top priorities.