DevOps need a concrete roadmap to succeed.

As we’ve been discussing on our blog in recent weeks, DevOps are being hampered by several persistent myths involving the people, processes, and technologies essential to the success of DevOps. Those myths are creating obstacles to successful DevOps deployment. It’s no surprise that only 20 percent of enterprises that have attempted to implement DevOps have fully deployed the process, according to CA Technologies. The low adoption rate is a shame because DevOps offer so much potential to enable customer-centric product development through collaboration.

Moonshot, working with an outside research firm, recently surveyed U.S. senior IT professionals involved in DevOps to find out why the adoption rate isn’t higher. After we analyzed the roadblocks to success (ranging from poor resource allocation to an inability to unify fragmented processes), we saw a common thread contributing to DevOps failures: a haphazard implementation of DevOps resulting from a lack of a structured approach. Consequently, we have defined a recommended five-step DevOps adoption process in newly published report, A Guide for Successful DevOps Adoption.

That process begins with aligning an organizational strategy before assessing a company’s DevOps readiness (or maturity); creating a vision for the future state of people, processes, and technologies affected by the deployment of a new product via DevOps; establishing a DevOps roadmap to translate the future state into an action plan; and implementing the roadmap against defined metrics. The following graphic from our guide outlines the five steps:

As we have discussed in previous blog posts, most roadblocks to DevOps deployment pertain to managing tools, people, and processes effectively – especially people and processes. For instance, four out of the top five roadblocks relate to with personnel issues, such as a lack of relevant training and misalignment of responsibilities across people and teams. And the biggest obstacle comes down to poor allocation of resources.

Moonshot’s five-step DevOps Adoption Process tackles those interrelated roadblocks. For instance, in the Align Organizational Strategy step, the business establishes a vision and mission for the endeavor, defining goals and suitable metrics to measure how well the organization meets those goals. Then, in Step 2, Assess Current DevOps Maturity, the business identifies its current level of maturity across people, processes, and technologies required for successful DevOps adoption. For instance, in defining DevOps people maturity, the organization will look for the existence of specialized training programs and shared responsibilities.

You may quibble with the steps we have outlined, but it’s important that you possess a structured approach, however you define it. As one executive from a Fortune 100 firm told us during our research,

“We did not see the expected ROI from implementing DevOps practices. Following a more structured approach with clearly defined expected returns, goals and processes would have helped.”

Now that you see what the roadmap to success looks like, it’s time to get started deploying DevOps the right way. Moonshot can help you. We work with enterprises to help them not only define their strategy but also their roadmap for ensuring that people, processes, and technology work in sync to develop products focused on customer needs. Contact us to get started and for a copy of A Guide for Successful DevOps Adoption.

Stories from the Field

A restaurant chain was developing a new mobile application that was going to hit the market within three months. The client’s deployments were not happening quickly and efficiently to deliver the apps features to customers. The client needed a best-in-class DevOps process. Our client engaged with Moonshot over an 18-week DevOps assessment. Our deliverable provided a roadmap to allow the client to support this mobile application. The DevOps roadmap that covered the following: secure delivery pipeline, test-driven infrastructure, transient environments, version everything, infrastructure-as-code, predictable quality management, automation, InfoSec, as well as organization and people requirements for the path forward.

We team help identify many gaps preventing the client from having a secure DevOps process that would ensure the mobile app released features on time every two weeks (via a sprint cadence). The key to success was our being able view the challenge across people, processes, and technology; and delivering quick wins along with short-term and long-term success. We created a clear roadmap with measurable KPIs to enable a robust DevOps process for this mobile application. As part of our deliverable, the client received key pillars to optimize product acceleration.

Our DevOps Services

DevOps Assessment

We assess your organization across people, processes, and platforms to recommend a personalized DevOps approach.

The DevOps Center of Excellence

We provide leadership talent and best practices to guide the discovery and delivery of a digital product through DevOps ways of working.

DevOps Cloud Agnostic

We help clients transition from a legacy DevOps environment to the cloud.

DevOps Complex Delivery

This is a bundled offering in which we combine all the above core offerings. We provide an in-the-trenches Moonshot team to partner with your team to bring DevOps to life through a lighthouse project.

Richard Striedl

Practice Lead, DevOps

Bitnami