Organisations today have got to innovate and react quickly to customer demands in order to remain competitive. Servicing the customer is at the heart of any digital strategy and the Digital/Dev teams need to introduce changes to existing services to ensure the organisation is continually delivering value to the customer.
Organisations, at the same time, have got to ensure that existing customer services are not disrupted. The Operational focus needs to be on system stability and availability of services. In order to maximise service availability the Operational teams try to minimise the number of changes that could impact stability.
Organisations are now conflicted between the need to introduce as many changes as required to meet customer requirements and the need to minimise the number of changes to meet stability requirements. Whilst I.T. grapples with swinging between changing to meet customer requirements and not changing to ensure the customer is not disrupted, the business is held to ransom.
At FR@NK we actively work to break this conflict and allow organisations to innovate without compromising on stability.
We leverage the DevOps focus areas of Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement and Information Sharing for an end to end DevOps approach. Our high level approach is shown below:
- Define the DevOps Goal: All DevOps initiatives must have a goal to strive for. Typically organisations choose to maximise the number of changes that can be delivered in a given period whilst maintaining system stability, whilst simultaneously reducing the lead time between “aha to ka-ching’.
- Quantify the flow of work for Business Projects, I.T. Projects, Maintenance and Upgrades and most importantly define how much time the teams spend on unplanned or firefighting work.
- Identify the opportunities to improve flow between Digital/Dev and Ops.
- Work to minimise the amount of firefighting and rework by building quality and stability into the earlier stages of Dev.
- Maximise learning across the value stream and enable self-service to remove the reliance on key resource or functions.
What you get is a working environment focussed on continuous improvement, a move from a reactive way of working to a planned way of working and happy customers as due date delivery improves.
Apart from consultancy we also offer Foundations of DevOps training from the DevOps Institute.
To find out more, let’s chat.