Agile-DevOps Strategy — A Blueprint for Successful Transformation

In a recent blog post on Agile-DevOps, we presented a probing question and assertion, “How to Design a Great DevOps Strategy? Well, It Depends.” Our point of view is that “it depends” on having an actionable strategic roadmap customized to fit the most critical business, technology, and operational risks inhibiting maximum ROI — from your product lifecycle management through continuous delivery pipelines. The roadmap is a formal deliverable informed by an evaluation of the critical quality attributes across seven universally common aspects of our benchmark reference model, which characterizes any successful Agile-DevOps digital transformation journey.

Clearly, before embarking on a journey to find your way out of the woods, your strategy must be based on 1) An understanding where you currently are, 2) Where do you want to go, and 3) What you need to do to get there. That’s what NTT DATA’s DevOps Maturity and Enablement Framework for digital transformation road-mapping provides. Delivered through NTT DATA’s Trusted Advisory Partner offering, this framework enables us to quickly produce a formal deliverable to accelerate and smooth the digital transformation journey in the context of:

• Principles + Patterns + Practices: What methodology and framework for maximum productivity?
• People: What skills, how to better utilize human capital and improve employee satisfaction?
• Processes: What are the participants, activities, workflow, KPIs, and capability dependencies?
• Platforms: What is the right mix of technologies to implement toolchain automation?
• Products: Where can architectural de-coupling be improved to maximize agility and DevOps ROI?
• Perspective: Is monitoring visibility enabled to confirm the desired results are being achieved?

Plan the journey, bring a compass

Charting a successful Agile-DevOps strategy is critical, but need not be daunting. NTT DATA’s DevOps Maturity Evaluation and Enablement Framework helps identify the challenges, establish risk themes, and personalize goals through a series of discovery sessions with the business, technology, and operations functions. The framework and the supporting product provides a systematic, comprehensive, repeatable, and scalable approach to ranking and scoring capabilities and gaps with associated KPIs to inform Agile-DevOps center of excellence governance mechanisms. The framework analyzes the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) relative to the underlying benchmark reference model by plotting defined Agile-DevOps capability quality attributes across a matrix of aspects and maturity levels.

The eight aspects of DevOps covered include culture, architecture, continuous integration and build, verification, continuous deployment and packaging, automation, security and monitoring. And the maturity levels are measured on a scale from zero to five, where equals readiness, and equals tansformative.

The roadmap content (generated by the framework roadmap generator), becomes a veritable playbook and ensures you have a short-, mid-, and long-term implementation blueprint, with recommendations that can be systematically and efficiently achieved. Furthermore, enterprises can also monitor KPIs associated with the business, development, security, and operations functions on a dashboard with a quality maturity index. Monitoring these channel-specific KPIs will ensure that the Agile-DevOps Center of Excellence gets the much-needed visibility. The KPIs will also justify continued funding, and inform any reprioritizations in response to dashboard trends.

This roadmap helps organizations execute the custom-designed DevOps strategy along with our applications management, or as managed hybrid implementations with mixed client and/or multi-vendor teams.

Unlock new possibilities

Many clients have also benefited from our Agile-DevOps Innovation Labs, a training hub that helps clients evaluate new tools outside of their own DevOps toolkit, and where they can try “what if” scenarios. The lab provides the methods, processes, technologies, accelerators, and platforms to answer questions such as: “How will the dashboard from this new monitoring tool interface with our existing data analytics platform?” or “How best will a particular configuration management tool interoperate with a new container orchestration platform?”

Craft a winning strategy

At NTT DATA, we are aware that your business and its complexities are not the same as that of your competitors. These differences get magnified when transitioning to something as over-reaching and organization-wide as DevOps. What we do depends solely on you, and efforts in due-diligence ensure that we offer cost-effective, right-fit solutions. The success of our DevOps projects does not depend on the infrastructure, tools, or how big the team is, but rather on the collaboration and partnership we build. The DevOps transformation journey need not be a daunting affair when you choose the right partner.

Download Build and Execute an Agile Roadmap for Transformation and let us help you get started on your DevOps journey.