BizOps Value Delivery: The 3 Technical Virtues That Fuel Success

Through adopting BizOps approaches, your team can strengthen its alignment around your organization’s top business outcomes. This blog post examines three key technical characteristics that teams should always look for as they seek to boost BizOps value delivery.

The Challenge: Ensuring Daily Technology Decisions Map to Key Outcomes

To contend with our rapidly changing world, teams continue to employ new concepts, approaches, methodologies, frameworks, and tools. By embracing DevOps, CI/CD, AIOps, and Agile, to name just a few, teams are getting better equipped to tackle the challenges their modern businesses face.

In spite of the many benefits these concepts provide, it can still be difficult to be sure your delivery initiative is squarely aligned with, and making meaningful progress towards, top-level objectives. Delivery is where the “rubber meets the road,” the point at which people actually use the systems and services developed. These systems must provide value, and optimally enable more value to be delivered over time. This is what we call value delivery, and it’s a critical determinant of business success today.

In a typical organization, a range of people are responsible for value delivery success. People may have a wide range of roles and levels of responsibility. People can be spread across multiple groups and bring different disciplines and sets of expertise to the table. Given the diversity of people involved, the risk of confusion and failure to achieve desired objectives can be high. The need to speed delivery and take on large-scale initiatives can exacerbate the risks.

It is for these reasons that many teams are pursuing BizOps, a strategic framework that seeks to align IT efforts and investments with business outcomes. (See our “What is BizOps?” page to learn more about this framework.) This focus on business outcomes can be indispensable in helping fuel value delivery success. However, as delivery efforts ramp up, many specialized issues and situations may arise, and it can be difficult for participants across an organization to determine how their specific technology decisions may relate to the desired business outcome.

Fortunately, there are three common technical characteristics that successful delivery initiatives have in common, and that are well aligned with BizOps strategies. No matter your role or level in the organization, you can think of these characteristics as guideposts that can inform decision making at every point of the delivery process. By focusing on these three technical virtues, you can better ensure you make efficient progress toward your BizOps objectives and boost your odds of success.

#1. Increase Integration and Interoperability

The idea here is to break down silos by increasing integration and interoperability between disparate, previously isolated digital systems. This is true no matter how capable a given application or system is. If you can’t use different systems to access data in another system, you will always encounter limitations.

This isn’t to say all systems must be integrated; that may not be the case. However, this is to say that systems that lend themselves to open and deep integration will better contribute to BizOps goals over time. Speed and focused efficiency are central to BizOps. It will not be possible to completely analyze every technical move against the target business outcome or to accurately predict the future every time you make a technology decision. If you make a decision or choose a technology that promotes this virtue, you are helping to optimally position your organization to pursue BizOps.

#2. Improve Visibility and Insight

With improved integration comes the challenge of making use of the integrated data. This is why it’s so vital to improve visibility and insight into your digital systems. Any time you make a decision or move that improves insight; it can go a long way toward supporting your objectives.

This approach may manifest itself as a new management display, improved logging, or an alert with relevant information, to mention only a few. BizOps initiatives are often focused on speed, and the reality is that the future isn’t known. Given that, it’s best to look at improvements in this area that are, or can be, parameter driven. This allows some flexibility in applying improvements over time. Of course, you must always work in alignment with relevant initiative deadlines and schedules. However, striving for this technical virtue will enhance BizOps value delivery.

#3. Maximize Automation

Wherever and whenever possible, look to automate work that requires repetitive toil or labor-intensive processes.

Business outcomes must be focused on customers, product, and service creation or expansion. This requires creative and innovative thinking. In order to have time to focus on these outcomes, teams must ensure that the technology systems supporting day-to-day operations minimize labor-intensive and repetitive work. From the outset, and throughout the initiative, look to automate these tasks.

Only with this mindset will you be able to optimize operational efficiency and keep your valuable staff time focused on creation and innovation. On a day-to-day basis, your teams may be saddled with many heritage systems and approaches; it will take time to overcome this. However, if you make decisions and choices that improve automation, even in little ways, you’ll be going a long way to promoting BizOps results.

Conclusion

By focusing on the technical virtues above, your teams can better ensure they’re always aligning their decisions and value delivery efforts with your BizOps initiatives. Keep an eye on this site to learn more about how these three virtues support BizOps.