1. Track DevOps metrics
Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, educator and author of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, once said, "What gets measured gets managed." According to Drucker, as soon as you start monitoring something, you magically see improvement in that area.
Inform your team and start tracking a few key DevOps metrics. You'll get Drucker's magical performance boost and establish a baseline for assessing to what extent any additional steps you take impact your organization's agility.
Devops.com contributors Payal Chakravarty and David Shackelford recommend the following DevOps metrics:
- Lead time to develop an application: Helps you understand how quickly you develop applications
- Percentage of failed deployments: Tells you whether they deploy successfully
- Customer ticket volume: Indicates how many issues crop up
- Mean time to recovery: Shows how long it takes to recover from an application bug or failure
- User volume: Indicates how useful your users find your applications
These metrics might appear to contain self-defeating trade-offs (e.g., the faster you develop, the more likely you are to make a mistake), but DevOps makes it possible to score well on all five agility metrics.
2. Tackle new projects using 'Mode 2'
Coined by Gartner, "bimodal IT" is an IT strategy that simultaneously embraces traditional IT ("Mode 1"), which emphasizes reliability and accuracy, and modern IT ("Mode 2"), which emphasizes speed and agility. In other words, with a bimodal IT approach, you don't need to abandon your existing Mode 1 applications and infrastructure to gain the benefits of Mode 2.
But how do you decide which projects should use Mode 1 versus 2? The bimodal IT best practices from Gartnerrecommend Mode 1 for systems of record and Mode 2 for systems of differentiation and innovation.
Over time, as you find opportunities to employ Mode 2, your business's ability to respond quickly to market dynamics should improve.
3. Explore DevOps-friendly PaaS technology
Now that you're completing some of your organization's projects with greater speed and agility, you should consider platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which further facilitates a DevOps approach.
PaaS is a cloud-based platform that makes it easier for developers and IT operations to build, deploy and manage applications and avoid many infrastructure-related challenges and expenses. IT also can use PaaS technology to collaborate and iterate more tightly with line-of-business managers.
Tracking DevOps metrics, using Mode 2 for new projects and exploring PaaS implementation are effective entry-level steps you can take to increase agility. Act today and soon your organization should find itself better positioned to compete and thrive in today's rapidly changing world.
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