DevOps assessment service
The business benefits to following DevOps principles
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.
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?
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.
REMEMBER:
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.
What is a DevOps assessment?
A DevOps assessment is a structured evaluation of business practices, processes and cultures in relation to the core DevOps principles. Experts can analyse aspects of development, deployment and operations to identify strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement.
Evaluating existing tools and workflows helps identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and areas where DevOps practices can be applied. 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.
- Benchmark human-led change to gain buy-in and keep people on track
- Uplift DevOps capabilities
- Share knowledge across the entire organisation
- Improve quality, productivity and CX
- Transition from a project to product led approach
- Put people over process and technology
- Create happier, more productive teams, which means faster output and happy customers
- Meet 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 reach the next milestone.
What’s involved in a DevOps assessment with Catapult?
As a partner of the DevOps Institute, we deliver 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 the DevOps metrics and analyse the data to create a DevOps Roadmap, build a DevOps model and continuously improve DevOps performance. 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 does a DevOps assessment evaluate team structure?
Team structure plays an integral role in the successful implementation of DevOps practices. DevOps emphasises collaborative work environments, with a range of teams working across the software development cycle.
DevOps assessments often evaluate team structures to ensure alignment with principles, reviewing how teams are organised, how team members communicate and how they manage responsibilities. A well structured team fosters a culture of continuous improvement and efficiency, helping business reap all the benefits of DevOps practices.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you’re ready to embrace a DevOps culture in your organisation, call our team for a DevOps assessment.
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