Making the case for added DevOps Investments

"How do I make the case for more investment in our DevOps infrastructure?" This is a common question amongst engineering leaders at Fortune 500 companies. The frustration is understandable.  In large firms the attraction to improve the front-facing parts of their product experience and under invest in the back end is akin to building a Ferrari and driving it on an unpaved road.

Delivering applications involves getting an idea into a working product with a user experience. To narrow that down, you have the highly variable and humanistic activities of the fuzzy front end. The fuzzy front end describes the early creative, design, and framing activities around what product and features to deliver. You can't automate humanity and creativity. However; after you figure out what to deliver, you can optimize, streamline, and accelerate the product delivery.

Source: IBM

According to a McKinsey study, digital organizations can clear this bottleneck by extending the DevOps model so that application development, application operations, and IT infrastructure work as one. Based on our experience, the benefits of this move include:

• A 25 to 30 percent increase in capacity creation.
• A 50 to 75 percent reduction in time to market.
• A greater than 50 percent reduction in failure rates.

To bring greater attention to what is generally considered “the plumbing”, it is important first to pull back and make sure DevOps is being framed broader than simply a technical need. The benefits have to tie back to specific customer wants. Since the investment cycle into this infrastructure is perpetual, the metrics that measure that investment's health must be clearly understood and made visible.

What is Dev-ops

DevOps is generally defined in two ways - hard assets and soft assets.

Hard assets include continuous delivery pipelines, modernization of the product architecture, and tools that enable automated deployment and testing. 

Soft assets include the cultural philosophies, practices, and governance changes that help to cement the DevOps mindset into the organizations DNA.

"Speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market."
Amazon

What does effective dev-ops enable

DevOps is more than just the paved road that enables faster shipping. Ultimately strong DevOps should directly affect customer satisfaction. An effective DevOps culture also enables more experimentation, as product teams can deliver features in smaller units. Underpinning both speed and nimbleness is a focus on continuous and automated testing. 

Improving customer service

Customers satisfaction with new features, including how often they expect to see new features and how reliable these features are. DevOps has a strong influence on two out of those three criteria. One of the main tasks of DevOps is to develop better software and deliver it faster to end-users. "Fast" is subjective based on the industry. Generally exceeding customer expectations of "fast" though tends to increase loyalty over time. Studies have shown that with DevOps, organizations can accelerate their deployment frequency by 200x and recovery times by 24x. 

The second sign of success with investment in DevOps should be a reduction in change failure rates. It becomes possible to ensure an application's reliability and stability after every new release by automating the delivery pipeline. When the applications perform flawlessly, organizations reap the benefits of greater customer satisfaction. 

Innovation

Companies have to stay ahead of, or at a minimum, keep up with innovations. DevOps can be a good helper in supporting digital services offered to the market. While DevOps does not directly identify new features customers may want, DevOps effectively frees up engineering talent for innovation through automation and reducing the number of firefights.

Deployment phases are more relaxed. Better rested teams are more likely to bring innovative approaches for improving the overall customer experience.

Faster delivery time 

DevOps' main principles – automation, continuous delivery, and quick feedback cycle – aim to make a software development process faster and more efficient. Being an evolutionary stretch of the Agile methodology, DevOps utilizes automation to ensure a smooth flow of the SDLC. By promoting a collaborative culture, it offers the scope for quick and continuous feedback so that any glitches are fixed in time and the releases are done faster. 

Today's software development practices require teams to continuously deliver quality software, reduce go-to-market timelines, and adapt shorter release cycles. DevOps enables this through automation. Automated CI/CD pipeline allows the Dev and Ops teams to develop and integrate code almost instantaneously. Further, when QA is embedded and automated, it takes care of code quality. DevOps promotes better efficiency, higher quality, and faster & continuous releases. 

Why are there frictions to investment 

A survey on 'The State of IT Modernization' by IDG revealed that only 26% of the organizations have completed their initial stages of IT modernization.

There are a range of reasons but in general we find that business owners do not fully understand the subject. More common than not, it is assumed to be relegated as plumbing and infrastructure spend. When budgeting push comes to shove, new features command investment dollars. 

On the other side of the coin, engineering teams are not naturally equipped to quantify the benefits from any investment in the infrastructure. Newer scaled agile frameworks attempt to solve for this by prescribing an amount of bandwidth to be set aside within each sprint to be used at the discretion of the engineering teams. In practical implementations these have to be protected. 

Making the business case for DevOps investments

To begin, engineering teams must have a sense of their peer benchmarks. A high-level business case for agile DevOps should position investments relative to specific customer wants and needs based on benchmarking results. In addition to quantifying the gains that DevOps at scale can deliver, the engineering teams must also assess the business tradeoffs among agility, cost, and quality.

In providing a framework to measure and track the ROI on DevOps investments, engineering teams could highlight the following metrics for their product:

Lead time: The lead time is the amount of time it takes to implement, test, and deliver code. 

Deployment frequency: Deployment frequency is the number of deployments over a period of time.

Meantime to restore (MTTR): The time that it takes to restore service after a production failure and the business cost of that downtime

Change fail percentage: The change fail percentage is the ratio between unsuccessful and successful changes. 

Customer satisfaction / NPS: Customer satisfaction trends since the formal investment into a DevOps program

Source: BCG

A transformation's success is measured in improved delivery and service outcomes. Consequently, incentives should emphasize team results. To reinforce this connection, leading businesses are putting metrics that balance business value, time-to-market, service availability, quality, and overall employee satisfaction. These metrics enable IT infrastructure organizations to align the goals and perspectives of developers, operational teams, and business leaders.

In Conclusion

Engineering leaders must make a compelling case for on-going investment into their DevOps infrastructure. It is paramount for the long term health and viability of their products in the marketplace.