The MMT DevOps Assessment is one of four Digital Maturity Assessments, designed to measure your company’s ability to respond quickly to ever shifting consumer demand landscape and rapidly evolving tech innovation.
Our DevOps Assessment is a set of audits that investigate your current DevOps processes and tools while identifying key opportunities for improvement. Ultimately, the goal is to empower your teams to deliver digital products, services and features faster, with the focus on value to the business and its customers.
Embedding a culture of agile development in your organisation is key to successful DevOps. One that prioritises seamless communication, open flows of information and clear visibility of products in development. By pinpointing communication roadblocks between your development and operations teams, our DevOps Assessment is the first step to creating coherent end-to-end processes and moving swiftly towards your company goals.
Unlocking agile best practice with DevOps
We believe mindset and culture are the bedrock of DevOps effectiveness. Through a detailed assessment of your DevOps capability, we’ll help your company identify areas where a culture or mindset shift will help make your teams more agile. We’ll also provide a detailed report of our findings and outline some recommended next steps.
The process:
Throughout our DevOps Assessment process, we’ll interview teams across your organisation to help shine a light on how teams and individuals work together.
An initial meeting will establish why we are here, what challenges your company is facing and the key areas to target.
The next step is conducting detailed interviews and workshops focused on the delivery process and the cohesion of your teams.
We’ll also do a deep dive into your products, uncovering important details on how your teams work together at key stages, such as during engineering and delivery.
We’ll also explore your documentation and dashboards to clarify the visibility of crucial data, as well as how people are kept informed of changes or issues. If possible, we’ll observe a feature being implemented, a release taking place, a patch being applied or the decommissioning of a product.
From this process of watching, learning, listening and reading, we’ll apply our expertise and experience in shaping effective DevOps teams within large and complex organisations to help steer your company towards more effective DevOps.
Addressing your DevOps pain points
A key part of our assessment involves our experts identifying areas where DevOps may be holding your company back. As experts in digital transformation, we know that each organisation is different – and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to DevOps. However, there are some common challenges that tend to prevent companies from delivering products as quickly and effectively as they’d like.
These include:
A lack of vital metrics
The speed a product goes from concept to delivery is key. But if this product goes back and forth between departments, the speed-to-market metric is often lost, leaving teams unsure of expected lead, cycle and delivery times.
Barriers to communication
Systems designed to support efficiency sometimes do the opposite. It often takes a third party to step back and identify those systems and processes that aren’t contributing positively to your goals. For example, inefficient ticketing systems often slow down development, creating a queue and increasing the need for manual labour.
Siloed teams
Agile development is almost impossible when teams are built rigidly around a function. This creates an environment in which work is handed back and forth, without a clear responsibility for delivery. Often, it is more effective to build a team around your feature or product, so that those same people can deliver it from start to finish.
These are just some of the pain points our DevOps Assessment process will highlight. How they manifest themselves will depend on the size and complexity of your organisation, but in each case, the key to solving them is shifting to an agile mindset.
Practical next steps for your company’s DevOps
At the end of the assessment, we’ll provide you with a report that highlights all the areas where your DevOps is currently performing well, as well as key areas of improvement. For each challenge we identify, we’ll provide a potential solution.
Our suggested solutions are always pragmatic and designed to fit your business. We focus them on drivers of value such as efficiency, cost savings, delivery to market and speed. We’ll also point out any security issues that should be dealt with as a priority.
In practice, our recommendations take many forms and may include a redesigned team structure and organisational model, or more efficient processes and enhanced technical capabilities. We can also support you to fill gaps in your capabilities to accelerate your journey to agile maturity. One of our services is providing the cloud and infrastructure engineering talent you need to build a sector-leading DevOps capability.
Martin Ward
Head of Engineering, MMT
Whichever way you choose to implement our recommendations, our aim is to help your DevOps activities drive constant improvement and develop a continuous delivery pipeline, allowing you to move smoothly from writing code to deploying it at pace.
If you’d like to find out how we can transform your DevOps culture and drive value in your business, get in touch for more information or to book a discovery call.
