2. IT teams are struggling to drive
grow-the-business Digital
initiatives while still “keeping
the lights on.”
At the same time, there are budgetary reductions
and demands to increase capacity and capability
without disruption. Continuous Delivery promises
the panacea of speed, quality, and efficiency; but
it can be difficult to implement. Before Continuous
Delivery can be successfully implemented within
an organization, a few things are required. This
includes a cultural transformation, unified charters
and KPIs, a coherent strategy, and office spaces
that are conducive to collaboration.
Activating Your
Continuous Delivery
Strategy
3. Determine
Where You Are Now
There needs to be a clear path for implementing continuous
delivery and an “always on” mindset to be successful.
Conduct a workshop to identify where you might implement
Agile or DevOps to get started. Use that information to build
a step-by-step, incremental rollout plan for the rest of your
organization. Remember, this is a journey that does not have
to be done all at once.
4. Shift Your Thinking
DevOps and Agile bring a lot of rigor to the development and release
processes; they give you structure. However, if we change the way we
work, the real gains will come from a cultural shift that allows speed and
quality to increase in tandem. Building cross-functional working groups and
product-aligned engineering teams, with training and shared metrics, will
drive towards continuous delivery goals and remove silos. This starts with
shifting your thinking.
Implement common unified
goals across teams.
Integrate product
teams to support the
entire lifecycle.
Reorient skills towards full
stack engineers.
5. Eliminating
overloads
Eliminating
imbalances
Apply Agile and DevOps Aggressively
Start identifying cross-functional teams to determine who is needed to get
your next update released. Determine the fewest number of steps you need to
speed up the process. Use that as a baseline, and apply Agile processes.
This can include daily stands, sprints, transparent processes and planning.
Bring mistakes, errors and anything that slows you down to the forefront, and
encourage team members to address challenges head-on and in real-time.
6. Accelerate
Automation and tools
Look for an end-to-end workflow driven platform. It should consist
of toolkits that help analyze complex application portfolios, design
transition plans, implement solution models, and help develop a detailed
transformation roadmap to take you from the current state to best-in-class.
Look for a platform that offers
dashboards to measure, track
and report the state of the
engagement, and the business
value delivered.
Look for a platform that
provides real-time access
to view issues and
check progress.
Accelerate
Automation and tools
Rationalize and adapt your toolsets. One of the quickest wins is taking a hard look at the tools
you need to run your organization and how those are being used. Apply the 80/20 rule, and
see if you can hone in on the tools that are making the biggest impacts. This same approach
will fit nicely with automation because you will be able to identify common tasks. You will
find this by understanding your toolset and how it is being used.
Look for an end-to-end workflow driven platform. It should consist of toolkits that
help analyze complex application portfolios, design transition plans, implement
solution models, and develop a detailed transformation roadmap, to take you from
the current state to best-in-class.
7. Build Strong Service Integration
To stay ahead of business transformation, it has become imperative for IT
leaders to shift their focus toward modernizing and optimizing the traditional
ways of managing IT by:
1. Eliminating silos to reduce costs.
2. Increasing productivity through
continuous automation.
3. Shortening time-to-market through
continuous integration.
4. Freeing time, energy, and money
for innovation.
8. Make Continuous
Delivery a Reality
Lower operations
costs by up to 30%.1
Give IT teams the
opportunity to grow
with innovative ideas.
2
Improve delivery
times to enhance the
user experience.
3
Shifting to continuous delivery will give you the modernized IT
operations you need to stay ahead of business transformation.
As a result, your business can: