The divergent benefits of DevOps

Ask ten people involved in IT what the business benefits of DevOps are, and you’re likely to receive a range of answers. What matters to a CEO, for example, may well be at odds with the viewpoint of an IT Manager.

The value-driven benefits for CEOs

The business outcome of DevOps is the main area of interest for CEOs. What’s important to them is how any investment in DevOps will lead to higher revenue and/or profitability, whether that’s delivered through tangible cost reductions, faster speed to market, or other improvements in business performance. From a CEO perspective, the most important benefits are:

• Faster time to market
• Higher quality products
• A stable, reliable IT infrastructure
• Higher customer satisfaction
• Lower costs
• Improved business efficiency
• Higher revenue

The value-driven benefits for CIOs

At the next level down, the focus of the CIO or Head of IT is more practical. It’s about the processes that can be put in place to increase the throughput of the IT department, for example, or how skilled IT staff can be recruited and retained when there is a skills shortage. From a CIO perspective, the most important benefits are:

? Improved operational support and faster fixes

? Good processes across IT and teams, including automation

? Increased team flexibility and agility

? Happier, more engaged teams

? Cross-skilling and self-improvement

? Collaborative working

? Respect from senior management

? Rewards and feelings of success

? Freedom to experiment

The value-driven benefits for IT Managers

For IT Managers or Technical Leads, the concern is more firmly on the output and performance of the IT department or team. They care about metrics like the speed of deployments or the number of new releases delivered by their teams. They’re also more interested in the ability to reduce defects, decrease downtime, or improve time to recovery, perhaps reflecting the pressure on them to maintain what is a core function for the business. From an IT Manager perspective, the most important benefits are:

? The faster speed and lower cost of a release

? A lower volume of defects

? Improved frequency of new releases and features

? Application performance

? The mean time to recover (MTTR) from errors

? The change failure rate

? Number and cost of resources

? Number of unused features in production

Summary

When talking about how the ROI of DevOps can be measured in terms of the business benefits and added value to be gained, it’s worth reflecting that there is not one answer. Instead, the answer depends on who is judging the value of those benefits. For any DevOps initiative, the concerns of each of the stakeholders involved should therefore be considered and addressed.

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