I had the pleasure of joining Bola Rotibi, Research Director at Creative Intellect Consulting, during Serena’s DevOps Drive-In Webcast, hosted earlier today. (I forgot to order my popcorn when registering!) My key takeaways from the session come from Bola’s slide titled, “Ten points for gearing towards Continuous Delivery:”
- Assessment: knowing where you are and want to go is always a good thing. During the webinar, I asked Bola about measures (of success) and supported my question with an observation made during numerous prospect and customer visits. Oftentimes, companies are focused on doing the right things but cannot always articulate what success looks like. You should be able to concisely, and objectively, tell your boss how you have been successful. A simple example would be, “We’ve been able to reduce the total time spent by our release team deploying software into the Integrated Test environment by 45%.”
- Commitment: “A commitment to Business Agility must be comprehensive.” I choose to read this a couple of ways. First, the organization must be committed to change. Your boss and his/her boss must be regularly asking you, “How’s it going? We’re under pressure to improve operational efficiency and our responsiveness to the business.” Second, the various stakeholders (development, operations, service delivery, etc.) must have a common measure of success, preferably with some portion of their bonus dependent on achievement of a goal.
- Automation: As I stated during the webinar, and as I do when visiting our customers, the most immediate “place” to start is replacing manual deployment steps with automated application release automation. Assuming you have the commitment of management (see #2), you can easily and quickly demonstrate success that is in alignment with your destination (see #1).
Watch the 2-minute video of Bola reviewing the slide above and detailing which ones to focus on.
