Mapping out your DevOps journey

I am writing this on a flight from Washington, DC to Austin, TX. How long does it take me to get to Austin, you may ask? The flight is 3 hours and 3 minutes long. The time it takes me, however, is much longer as I do not live at the airport (although it surely feels like it). How long a journey takes depends on where you start.

A question I get asked often is how long will it take my organization to adopt DevOps? First of all, one does not just adopt DevOps. One starts a journey of adopting the capabilities that make up DevOps (more on that soon). Adopting DevOps is not a one-time thing – it is an ongoing thing. That said, even when it comes to adopting a single capability of DevOps, say Continuous Delivery, how long it takes you depends on where you start.

It’s a journey

Adopting DevOps is not a “one-and-done” project. It is adopting a mindset, a culture. It is a commitment to a journey of continuous improvement by adopting a set of capabilities and practices that are based on Lean principles. IBM has identified a set of six capabilities to adopt in this DevOps journey:

1. Continuous Business Planning
2. Collaborative Development
3. Continuous Testing
4. Continuous Release and Deploy
5. Continuous Monitoring
6. Continuous Feedback and Optimization

Adopting DevOps requires process improvement, automation of the processes using tools, and organizational change to enable a DevOps culture.

Where to Start?

The question then becomes – where does one start? This requires knowing ‘Point B’ where you want to go – what business goals do you want DevOps to help you achieve? And it requires knowing the ‘Point A’ of your journey – where you are today – and how mature you are when it comes to practicing these capabilities today. Once you know Points A and B, you can chart out an adoption road map. Starting from a level of immaturity where you don’t even have good source code management practices, and wanting to get to ‘no downtime’ deployment, is going to be a long journey.

The IBM DevOps pipeline Value Stream mapping workshop

At IBM, we help our customers get started by conducting a ‘DevOps pipeline Value Steam Mapping workshop’. This strategic workshop is a 1-day (usually 6 hour) executive workshop designed to enable IBM to understand your business and IT goals (Point B) and to help you identify gaps in your existing DevOps capabilities (Point A) that IBM can help you address. We identify ‘Point A’ by mapping out your end-to-end Application Delivery pipeline, and identifying areas of inefficiencies in the pipeline.

The result of the workshop is a prioritized list of DevOps Capabilities and an adoption ‘roadmap’ to start your DevOps adoption journey.

‘Get Mapped’ at IBM InterConnect

During IBM InterConnect, The Premier Cloud and Mobile Conference in Las Vegas, February 22-26, I am conducting condensed versions of these workshops, right there on-site. These are 2-hour sessions during which IBM DevOps SMEs will work with you to map out your application delivery pipeline and identify your key ‘bottlenecks’ or inefficiencies. We can then schedule a follow-up at your site to jointly develop a DevOps adoption roadmap so you can address these bottlenecks using the relevant DevOps capabilities – along with process improvement, tool adoption for automation, and organizational change.

Space is very limited for dedicated workshops (“DevOps Transformation Workshops”) – contact your IBM rep about nominating your company for one of the sessions. If none are available, sign-up for either the “Innovation Workshop” or “DevOps Technical Workshop,” which are similar, but will have multiple companies participating.

For more information about IBM InterConnect 2015 DevOps Workshops and how to sign-up please visit:  https://ibm.biz/BdETbW