DevOps, like Agile, has transformed enterprise software delivery. Thanks to sprints, prioritization, CI/CD and release automation, organizations are building and deploying software products faster than ever. That pesky bottleneck between code commit and deploy has been all but eliminated, which should ensure better time to value for customers.
Yet if your flow time – i.e. end-to-end lead time – is still too long, unpredictable and unmeasurable, it’s likely you’ve only shifted the bottleneck further upstream. Sure, automation has sped up handoffs and communication between developers and operations, but what about everything else that happens in the process?
What about all the other manual processes that take place before and after a piece of code is written? If there are still manual handoffs at key stages of the process, then your overall workflow is still being impeded by bottlenecks outside of the DevOps stage.
As Dominica DeGrandis, our Director of Digital Transformation, explains in her latest article for TechBeacon, you can only identify and remove these bottlenecks if you can see them. A LOT happens before ‘Dev’ and after ‘Ops’. A lot of creative thinking and activity ensures the right product is built, maintained and delivering value to the end user. And unless you can trace and automate the flow of work from ideation to production, you won’t be able to optimize the process. You need to collect and consolidate all data that pertains to planning, building and delivery of the product.
So how do you avoid bottlenecks and accelerate your DevOps (and other IT) transformations? First, you need to ask some important questions:
- Get the right metrics – are you measuring right thing?
- Do you understand how value flows across the process?
- Can you easily obtain real-time metrics across the process?
- Are you able to produce accurate traceability and other performance reports?
If the answer is “no” or you’re not sure, then it’s likely your software delivery value stream is still a mysterious black box of activity, and not optimized as a result. With no visibility into the end-to-end process, how do you know where to look for bottlenecks? How do you where the opportunities are to create more value?
The good news is that you can “reveal” and optimize the software delivery process by connecting and automating the flow of work between teams and tools via value stream integration.
For a deeper look into how to find and remove bottlenecks, check out Dominica’s piece Break through those DevOps bottlenecks.
For a more dynamic discussion, request a personalized demo of your software delivery value stream. We can help you connect your value stream network, spot bottlenecks, and dramatically improve how fast and well you deliver innovative software products.
