For CIOs and CTOs, the software delivery pipeline has become a boardroom issue. It now directly shapes cost control, operational risk, regulatory exposure and the organisation’s ability to compete.
The business wants speed. Regulators demand assurance. Customers expect reliability. Failure on any front is no longer tolerated.
Yet in many organisations, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are actively holding the business back. Builds are slow, tests are unreliable and manual deployments turn what should be a high-performance delivery engine into a drag on growth.
The result is wasted developer time, higher infrastructure costs and greater delivery risk.
This article shows how optimising your CI/CD pipeline cuts friction, reduces costs and strengthens resilience, turning what many view as ‘engineering plumbing’ into a true strategic asset.
The hidden costs of a poor CI/CD pipeline
Pipeline inefficiency is not a minor inconvenience, it’s a hidden drain on your organisation’s P&L.
Slow, fragile delivery pipelines quietly consume engineering capacity, inflate infrastructure spend and increase operational risk.
The costs are fourfold:
- Delivery friction. Builds that run over, encourage context switching and kill momentum.
- Security risk. Vulnerabilities slip through when checks happen late in the cycle.
- Financial waste. Every wasted build minute is infrastructure spend with no return.
- Strategic drag. Slow release cycles weaken competitiveness and brand trust.
For CIOs and CTOs, the opportunity cost is as damaging as the technical waste. While your teams wrestle with pipeline friction, competitors are shipping features, responding to customers and moving ahead.
What an optimised CI/CD looks like
An optimised CI/CD pipeline is built for speed, resilience and control. It accelerates delivery without compromising stability or compliance.
- Feedback. Fast feedback is non-negotiable. Builds and tests run in parallel, bottlenecks are engineered out and developers get answers in minutes, not hours. Momentum stays high and productivity follows.
- Quality. Quality is enforced by design. Automated quality gates, security checks and rollback mechanisms reduce change failure rates and make releases predictable rather than risky.
- Scale. The platform scales with the business. As users, transactions and data volumes grow, the pipeline adapts without runaway infrastructure costs or fragile workarounds.
- Performance. Performance is visible end-to-end. Lead time, deployment frequency, failure rates and recovery times are continuously measured, giving leadership real operational insight, not guesswork.
- Developer experience. Most importantly, the developer experience improves. Less waiting. Less firefighting. More time spent building value.
An optimised pipeline stops being a black box and becomes a high-performance production line for digital change.
When the business is ready to move, IT can move with it – quickly, securely and with confidence.
The four disciplines of high-performance pipelines
True optimisation isn’t about one tool, it’s about removing friction systematically. High-performing teams master four disciplines:
- Optimising Automated Testing Cycles
Adopt a ‘test pyramid’ approach. Broad unit test coverage, fewer integration tests and minimal but meaningful end-to-end tests. Run them in parallel, optimise environments and add static analysis to catch issues before builds even start. The goal is maximum confidence in minutes, not hours. - Integrating security early (DevSecOps)
Shifting security left avoids costly rework. Integrate automated scans into the pipeline; Static Application Security Testing (SAST) for source code; Software Composition Analysis (SCA) for open-source dependencies, so vulnerabilities are found when they’re cheapest and fastest to fix. - Leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Manual environment setup is a fast track to deployment failures and ‘it worked on my machine’ excuses. Defining infrastructure as code ensures every environment is consistent, auditable and reproducible – reducing errors, speeding up recovery and cutting compliance overhead. - Improving feedback loops with monitoring & alerting
Optimisation doesn’t stop at deployment. Integrating observability tools provides real-time data on both technical performance (CPU, latency, error rates) and business KPIs (conversion and engagement). Automated alerting closes the loop between development and production, creating a culture of continuous improvement.
Translating technical gains into business outcomes
Boards don’t care about pipelines, they care about results. The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) framework provides four metrics that connect engineering performance to business value:
- Deployment Frequency. How often value is delivered to customers.
- Lead Time for Changes. How quickly an idea turns into production impact.
- Change Failure Rate. The stability of releases.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). How quickly services are restored after incidents.
By improving these metrics, CIOs and CTOs demonstrate direct business outcomes:
| Technical Action | DORA Metric Improved | Business Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Faster tests & IaC | Deployment Frequency, Lead Time | Ship faster, out-innovate competitors |
| Integrated security scans | Change Failure Rate | Reduce breaches, avoid costly downtime |
| Proactive monitoring & alerting | MTTR | Recover faster, protect revenue and customer trust |
Organisations that excel in these metrics are consistently twice as likely to meet or exceed commercial goals. Optimisation is not an engineering exercise, it’s a growth driver.
Catapult’s approach to CI/CD pipeline optimisation
Optimising a CI/CD pipeline isn’t a one-off technical exercise. It’s a structured change programme. Catapult’s approach is designed for CIOs and CTOs who need measurable business outcomes, not just tooling tweaks.
- Audit and baseline
We start by reviewing your current pipelines against industry benchmarks and DORA metrics. This provides a clear, data-driven view of where time, cost and risk are being lost. - Optimise and automate
Using the four key disciplines – testing, security, Infrastructure as Code and monitoring, we streamline and automate the pipeline. The aim is to accelerate delivery, cut failure rates and reduce wasted spend. - Measure and improve
CI/CD isn’t static. We embed dashboards and continuous feedback loops so your leadership team can track improvements in lead time, reliability and cost per build over time.
This approach has been proven across financial services, government and regulated industries, where stability and compliance are non-negotiable.
By combining engineering rigour with a focus on measurable business outcomes, Catapult helps CIOs transform pipelines from hidden cost centres into strategic enablers of growth.
Building for speed and stability
A common misconception is that faster delivery creates more risk. In reality, optimised pipelines deliver both speed and stability:
- Small, frequent releases reduce the scope of change and make recovery easier.
- Embedded security ensures compliance without slowing delivery.
- Continuous measurement allows leaders to track ROI, costs and resilience.
The result is a delivery model where CIOs can confidently tell the board that faster does not mean riskier. Rather, it typically means safer, cheaper and more predictable.
Signs your pipeline is holding you back
Watch for these red flags:
- Releases take weeks instead of days.
- High rollback rates after deployments.
- Infrastructure spend keeps rising with no visibility of ROI.
- Developers complain of waiting and unreliable environments.
- Security issues discovered late in the cycle.
Each symptom points to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Left unchecked, these problems undermine competitiveness and morale.
Making the business case
To secure investment, pipeline optimisation needs to be framed in commercial terms, not engineering ones.
Faster and more reliable delivery directly supports revenue growth. When teams can ship new features and products quickly, the business captures market opportunities sooner and stays ahead of competitors.
A more resilient pipeline also reduces the risk of outages and failed releases. That means fewer customer-facing incidents, less reputational damage and lower regulatory exposure.
There is a clear cost benefit as well. Efficient pipelines reduce wasted developer hours, cut rework and lower infrastructure spend by removing unnecessary build and deployment overhead.
Finally, modern delivery practices improve retention. Top engineers want to work in organisations with fast, reliable pipelines, not ones held back by fragile, manual processes.
Quantify both the direct savings (hours freed, costs reduced) and opportunity gains (faster time-to-market, stronger customer trust). Boards respond to evidence, not technical jargon.
From bottleneck to business asset
Your CI/CD pipeline is either a growth engine or a handbrake. Left unchecked, it creates waste, amplifies risk and slows your ability to respond to customers and markets. In a world where digital speed defines competitiveness, that drag is no longer acceptable.
When optimised, the pipeline becomes a strategic asset. It enables faster innovation, lowers operational risk and gives leadership confidence that growth can be delivered safely, predictably and at scale.
For CIOs and CTOs, pipeline optimisation is no longer a technical detail. It is a commercial lever. Those who treat it as such will move faster, operate more securely and outperform their competitors.
See the full framework and specific outcomes we deliver through our CI/CD Pipeline Optimisation services.
