I get lots of questions from clients for how they can improve their DevOps “maturity”. It’s a fair question, but there’s a bit of flaw in the premise behind it, and that flaw is the notion that there’s an end-state for an evolving DevOps practice. Yes, you can certainly improve a DevOps practice in all 3 phases: People, Process, and Platforms. Yes, there is a certain level of maturity required to embrace all three phases, but please don’t fool yourselves into thinking there’s an end state.
Forrester’s Perspective On DevOps
We’ve published a lot of DevOps research over the last year or so. From the current state of DevOps to where it is going, we’ve covered it:
- The Future Of DevOps: If you’re just coming up to speed with DevOps, perhaps your engineering team is already engaging in DevOps and as a leader you’d like to gain some background, by all means – read the Future of DevOps and to learn why CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs see value in growing their DevOps practice and the impact they see it having on their business.
- The Forrester Guide To DevOps: If you’re engaged in DevOps and need a review of the fundamentals, read Forrester’s Guide to DevOps where we break down the major aspects of DevOps with a guide to the ins and outs of DevOps.
- The State Of DevOps: If you want to understand the current state of the DevOps landscape, this data driven report evaluates the success of DevOps-related initiatives, including transformation, challenges, technical practices, release frequency, and more.
From Adoption Excellence
Our most recent report, How To Go From DevOps Adoption To DevOps Excellence, is for organizations who already engaged in DevOp:, they are already seeing value, and they have aspirational goals to further improve and scale their DevOps practice further and, most importantly, don’t place artificial limits on where they can take their practice. This report describes the habits of highly successful DevOps teams and offers some practice advice as to how organizations might cultivate those practices.
Top-Tier DevOps Organizations Reject Artificial Limits
So how to go from adoption to excellence? Big picture: reject false constraints. Artificial limits such as, “we are a bank, we can’t use Netflix as an example.”, or “we are in a regulated industry, we can’t do product experimentation”. Or “we need to build a devops practice before we can VSM metrics”. All of these things are artificial limitations, the reality is not every company needs to be like Facebook or Netflix, but learning and adapting high end practices and technology can be done within any industry engaged in software development.
Want More
Conversations with clients are at the core of our research. If you want to learn more about DevOps, we’d love to hear from you. If you are a Forrester client, reach out to schedule a Guidance Session or Inquiry.
