DevOps assessment service

Accelerate continuous improvement during your DevOps journey with the SKILup Assessment

DevOps Institute SKILup ASSESSMENT logo

Embracing DevOps principles is key for businesses that want to remain competitive and deliver value to customers. 

Catapult can guide businesses in following these principles by assessing the current situation, offering expertise and implementing processes or technologies. Enterprise SKILup Assessment is an expansive version assessment delivered by DevOps Institute SKILup Assessment Consulting Partners to assess capabilities across multiple teams in enterprises of any size.

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Is your organization committed to change and digital transformation? Book a scoping call for a SKILup Assessment and we will assist you in planning and executing a deeper capability assessment across multiple teams in your enterprise.

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What is a DevOps assessment?

A DevOps maturity assessment is a structured evaluation of business practices, processes and cultures in relation to the core DevOps principles. Our expert DevOps Engineers can analyse aspects of development, deployment and operations to identify strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement.

By evaluating automation tools and workflows we identify identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and areas where DevOps practices can be applied. Our engineers can review key performance indicators (KPIs), system architecture and security to ensure all development processes align with DevOps principles.

A DevOps assessment can also include cultural evaluation — examining the team’s mindset towards collaboration, automation and continuous improvement. Engineers can also identify any skills gaps and recommend relevant training.

Why use Catapults DevOps services?

Why use Catapults DevOps services?

Unlike some traditional consultancies, our engineers actively follow and have hands-on experience with DevOps principles across every phase, from development to deployment. 

Our practical experience means that our assessment goes beyond theoretical discussions and frameworks. We use our deep understanding of principles to analyse current processes, identify areas for improvement and provide actionable insights. We can also support with the training, tools and actions needed to gain tangible results no matter where a business is in its DevOps journey.

Following the assessment we will:

  • Interpret the data
  • Draw insights
  • Make recommendations
  • Target specific improvement opportunities
  • Identify good practices

 

Why should businesses get a DevOps assessment?

DevOps services

Why should businesses get a DevOps assessment?

Improve Customer Experience and generate more value by:

  • Benchmarking DevOps capabilities
  • Share knowledge across the entire organisation
  • Improving quality, productivity and removing blockers
  • Transition to product based teams
  • Meeting continuously changing regulatory, governance and risk requirements

It’s important to remember that a DevOps assessment shouldn’t be a one-time occurrence. By taking the assessment periodically, organisations can look at the current state of the organisation, track progress and continually improve core capabilities.

What’s involved in a DevOps assessment with Catapult?

As a partner of the DevOps Institute, we deliver a comprehensive devops maturity framework with the SKILup DevOps capabilities assessment. We measure your current DevOps state and accelerate continuous improvement.

The assessment is:

  • Crowdsourced from 40 DevOps thought leaders
  • Based on a cost effective pay per use model
  • Vendor-agnostic

A DevOps assessment is a valuable tool at any stage of the DevOps journey. This comprehensive DevOps Assessment gives a business all the data needed to gain total visibility into current operations and team structure. 

We help businesses understand DevOps metrics and analyse the data to create a DevOps Roadmap, build a DevOps model and continuously improve DevOps performance, through experimentation. This ensures that businesses invest their budget, time and effort in the right way to hit KPIs.

The result? Happier, more productive teams, who deliver higher quality products to market, faster.

Why follow DevOps principles?

3D Illustration of DevOps icon

Why follow DevOps principles?

Following DevOps principles helps to improve collaboration, efficiency and reliability in software delivery, merging development and operations teams to ensure continuous integration and delivery. 

Following DevOps principles creates a culture of continuous improvement, allowing for quicker detection of issues, more consistent infrastructure management and faster, more reliable, deployments.

Automated testing and regular monitoring ensures stability, while the scalability of DevOps practices leads to cost savings and the ability to adapt to changing needs.

What are the principles of DevOps?

DevOps isn’t a specified role but a culture. So instead of relying on a ‘DevOps engineer’, it’s crucial for the entire organisation to embrace the principles.

Adhering to these key principles helps with the continuous delivery of applications and services at a faster pace than following a traditional software development model.

  • Collaboration – Development and operational teams should work closely together to improve communication throughout the deployment cycle.
  • Automation – Software engineers should automate as much as possible, particularly testing, to reduce human error, shorten iteration times and create a CI/CD pipeline.
  • Continuous improvement – This principle is key to Agile and DevOps practices and focuses on experimentation, minimising waste and optimising speed, cost and ease of delivery. A constant pipeline of updates helps bring more customer value.
  • Customer-centric actions – By shortening feedback loops, engineers can develop products and services around user needs. Teams also get immediate visibility into user interactions, enabling them to make impactful improvements.
  • Create with the end in mind – Understanding the customer’s needs is key to creating a product that solves real problems. 

 

What other metrics are measured in a DevOps assessment?

DevOps metrics are the data points that best demonstrate the performance of current processes. 

The better that businesses understand and monitor these metrics, the faster they can embrace DevOps principles.

As part of its assessment, the Catapult team looks at four key metrics around DevOps performance:

Lead times
This is the time taken from making a commitment and releasing it to production. Teams will track when work begins and ends in project management tools.

The goal is to reduce lead times as much as possible, and can be achieved by motivating the team to tackle smaller chunks of work and automate wherever possible.
Change failure rate
This refers to the ratio between unsuccessful and successful changes. Failures, or unsuccessful changes, lead to service outages or issues that require immediate action. Teams can measure this by tracking the amount of deployments attempted and how many failed in production, and then take time to identify the root cause.

The goal is to meet the change failure rate of high-performing teams — which is widely thought to be around 0 to 15 per cent of all deployments. Businesses can use this figure to track progress, for example by integrating automation tools that can help reduce deployment issues.
Deployment frequency
This measures the number of successful releases over a certain period. Software engineers should increase the frequency of deployments to improve customer satisfaction.

The goal is to meet the continuous deployment rate of high performing teams, who can deploy new code into production multiple times a day, instead of weekly or monthly.
Mean time to recovery
This metric considers the time it takes an organisation to recover from a production failure. To measure this metric, engineers must track when an incident happens and when service is restored.

The goal is to improve responsiveness and enhance customer satisfaction, by ensuring a software engineer can quickly respond to customer support issues, deploy solutions and resolve the problem.
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 What are the benefits of a DevOps assessment?

  • Access, understand and compare DevOps capabilities across enterprise teams and improve DevOps skills
  • Benchmark DevOps maturity at any stage in a business journey and identify goals for improvement
  • Create a roadmap to advance DevOps skills and strengthen the culture of DevOps principles
  • Make data-driven decisions based on the best KPIs developed using DevOps principles
  • Maximise budget, time and effort by prioritising the most critical areas of your DevOps model
  • Optimise the CI/CD pipeline, achieve continuous improvement and faster time to market, enhancing customer experience  

Optimise your ways of working

If you’re ready to embrace a DevOps culture in your organisation, call our team for a DevOps assessment.

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