Think back to this time last year. As we moved toward 2020, what did you envision for the year ahead? I think it’s safe to say that 2020 ended up being nothing at all like what anyone envisioned, and fundamentally unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.
In contemplating visions and plans that don’t get realized, it seems that many can find some parallels between 2020 and their DevOps initiatives. After decades, the reality is that there’s a big gap between visions and realities:
While gains have certainly been made, for many, persistent obstacles remain. Further, as we enter 2021, new challenges now also have to be confronted. While organizations were in the midst of the cultural transformation inherent in DevOps, the progress made is being threatened by the ongoing onslaught of the pandemic, and the realities that accompany near-100% remote working for the foreseeable future.
This new paradigm raises the stakes for communication and collaboration—and that takes more than simply using a video conferencing app for team calls. Teams need to move toward what Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester Analyst, refers to as “spiritual colocation.” (Jeffrey Hammond spoke on this topic at our recent DevOps Virtual Forum. Be sure to visit the site to learn more.)
DevOps teams are striving to establish optimized continuous delivery pipelines. To realize this objective, and foster the collaboration required to establish spiritual colocation, teams need to focus on a pivotal metric: mean time to feedback. Once developers commit code, how long does it take until they get feedback? Or, if line-of-business leaders decide to move forward with funding a project, how quickly do they learn about the returns on that investment?
In recent months, it has been inspiring to see the increased adoption of value stream management, and the potential it provides for boosting collaboration and ultimately moving teams towards spiritual colocation. As teams move into 2021, look for value stream management to represent an increasingly strategic initiative, and receive expanding traction in enterprises.
According to a recent Gartner report, “By 2023, 70% of organizations will use value stream management to improve flow in the DevOps pipeline, leading to faster delivery of customer value.”1
Through value stream management, teams are realizing these gains:
To fully realize all the promise of value stream management, teams need to be able to leverage a platform that delivers a number of indispensable characteristics:
In the wake of continued technological advancements, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are poised to play a breakthrough role in powering the success of DevOps and value stream initiatives. After years of working with a large number of enterprises, we have been able to gain a lot of intelligence in this area. In particular, we’ve acquired a really strong understanding of the factors that influence DevOps teams’ key performance indicators (KPIs), and how we can identify specific anti-patterns that offer key insights for informing improvements.
In our daily work, there’s always more information available than we can possibly sift through and comprehend. This is particularly true for leaders of large enterprises; there are always a lot of things happening on a daily basis in our organizations that we don’t see. AI can be instrumental in enabling us to mine a massive amount of data and expose issues we otherwise would have missed. Following are a few examples of the ways AI and automation can help.
Historically, leaders have had a lot of interest in breaking down silos. I’ve been struck by how, in embracing value stream management, there’s the potential for teams to actually introduce a new silo—products. When teams define value streams for products, they tend to view these streams as an independent island. However, the reality in most enterprises is that a given product will have dependencies on other products and value streams. As teams get further into their value stream initiatives, they see they actually need to move to viewing and managing a network of value streams.
The challenge is that there haven’t been clear, standard, industry-wide definitions of many of the concepts being employed in enterprises today, including DevOps, agile, value management, site reliability engineering (SRE), and so on. Teams lack a common, bedrock framework to build upon. One of the key opportunities for BizOps is that it can help teams unify efforts across these disciplines. BizOps provides a critical context in terms of the core values and principles that teams need to embrace in order to unify their efforts.
Ultimately, by building on a focus on business outcomes, teams can harmonize their practices, language, and cultural elements. This unification around business outcomes can be instrumental in enabling remote teams to boost engagement and collaboration across teams, and ultimately achieving the spiritual colocation that represents a key to fueling long-term success for today’s enterprises.
Serge Lucio is Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom (ESD). In this role, he is responsible for the company's BizOps solutions that help organizations scale their digital transformation by fusing business and IT. Mr. Lucio joined the company through the CA Technologies acquisition where he was most recently SVP Product and Strategy for the mainframe business unit. Prior to this role, he held various leadership roles across Product Management, Strategy, and M&A at IBM. Mr. Lucio earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Telecom Nancy, France, and holds several patents in the Software Test Automation space.
To learn more about key strategies for success as your teams enter 2021, be sure to review this Gartner report: Predicts 2021: Value Streams Will Define the Future of DevOps
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