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Tag: employee satisfaction

  • Management and Culture

    Management and Culture

  • SolarWinds Survey Surfaces DevOps Disconnects

    SolarWinds Survey Surfaces DevOps Disconnects

    A survey of 336 developers, web product managers and DevOps practitioners published by SolarWinds, a provider of IT management tools, finds they spend most of their time troubleshooting applications—so much so that there is little time for strategic projects such as transitioning to DevOps practices.

    Joe Kim, executive vice president and global chief technology officer for SolarWinds, said that while senior IT leaders continue to preach about the critical role DevOps will play in changing their IT culture, IT staff still spends too much time dealing with tactical problems to implement any of the goals defined within a longer-term strategic plan. More than half of respondents (53 percent) said troubleshooting application issues is the top task completed on a given day.

    Because most of their time is spent on troubleshooting applications and not on managing and/or deploying applications, Kim said, many employees suffer from low morale. Then, before many IT leaders realize it, their best people are being lured away by the promise of working for an organization that enables them to focus more on the parts of IT process they enjoy, he said.

    In fact, Kim noted, in this situation IT leaders that embrace DevOps are in danger of losing credibility. If IT leaders tout the benefits of DevOps, and yet the internal IT staff is spending most of their time on application troubleshooting, chances are good many of the rank-and-file IT professionals will conclude their leaders are out of touch with their everyday reality. IT leaders would be well-advised to engage more with their IT staffs to make sure their strategies are more informed by that IT reality, he advised.

    The survey also finds respondents are spending less than 25 percent of their time proactively optimizing performance of their IT environments. Being able to spend more time on this aspect of IT is critical, because if more time is spent on proactively discovering issues, less time must be spent on troubleshooting, said Kim.

    IT teams should also be trying to push the boundaries of IT automation to reduce as much of the manual drudgery associated with IT as possible, added Kim.

    To get a better appreciation for real state of the IT environment, Kim advised IT leaders gather and share metrics with their teams. Not only does that provide IT teams with some sense of accomplishment as specific goals are achieved, the metrics make it easier to get IT teams to rally behind transitioning to DevOps best practices, he said. That’s crucial because any transition to DevOps is likely to fail because of cultural rather than technical challenges.

    It’s unlikely the need to troubleshoot applications ever will go away entirely. The developers that create those applications, after all, are only human. But it is possible to make working in IT a lot more fun and rewarding than what most IT professionals currently experience today.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Predictable Progress: Tracking DevOps Maturity Metrics

    Predictable Progress: Tracking DevOps Maturity Metrics

    As DevOps methodologies continue to evolve, we’re naturally seeing an increased emphasis on the cultivation of related maturity metrics.

    For instance, in the 2016 State of DevOps Report, researchers with DORA took an initial stab at creating relevant ROI measurements.

    Similarly, a new report issued by researchers Coleman Parkes, sponsored by CA Technologies, offers additional evidence that as agile and DevOps processes continue to expand, today’s practitioners are increasingly employing metrics to optimize their efforts.

    The report, titled, “Accelerating Velocity and Customer Value with Agile and DevOps,” finds some form of adoption among nearly every enterprise, with 87 percent having adopted agile to some degree and 73 percent leveraging DevOps.

    Related to the overall maturity of these practices, those organizations that are moving to embrace the techniques most broadly are predictably seeing greater returns. Yet, despite the widespread adoption, only a third have deployed either practice widely, according to the research.

    Percentage of Advanced Adopters Reporting Improvements in Customer Experience

     

    Based on a survey of 1,770 senior business and IT executives, the study also closely investigates the specific KPIs that organizations are using to gauge how agile and DevOps initiatives are translating into customer interactions.

    Most notably, “advanced” agile and DevOps adopters have observed more than an 87 percent improvement in overall customer experience, compared to “basic” adopters.

    In terms of how those efforts are affecting business drivers, Coleman Parkes finds:

    • Advanced agile practitioners are experiencing a 40 percent improvement in time-to-decision, compared to 33 percent for basic users.
    • Advanced DevOps adopters have noted a 42 percent improvement in speed-to-market, compared to only 24 percent for basic practitioners.

    Key Performance-Invoking Indicators

    To that end, the research highlights specific KPIs that organizations are using to measure the impact the agile and DevOps practices are having on customers. In fact, the study finds that between two thirds and three quarters of all the organizations surveyed have established such measurements.

    At least half of these focus on business or customer-related metrics, reflecting how “critical software has become to businesses’ ability to achieve their core mission,” Coleman Parkes researchers note.

    Among the mostly widely invoked metrics, include:

    • Business growth (specifically revenue): over 73 percent
    • Operational or process efficiency: over 73 percent
    • Employee productivity: over 73 percent
    • Customer experience: over 71 percent
    • IT-related costs: over 71 percent
    • Speed-to-market: over 71 percent
    • Customer satisfaction (via NPS): over 70 percent
    • Time-to-decision: over 70 percent
    • Quality of development: over 70 percent
    • Employee retention: over 64 percent

    If increasing applications delivery speed and overall organizational velocity are, in fact, the primary goals of engaging agile and DevOps, the research bears out that the techniques are having the desired effect. After all, the survey finds that time-to-decision and speed-to-market are being accelerated among approximately a third of the organizations studied.

    Related to other notable KPIs, Coleman Parkes highlights that a full three-quarters of adopters have moved the needle on overall customer experience, along with employee recruitment and retention, a significant benefit that was also highlighted in the State of DevOps Report.

    Along with positively impacting customers, the reality is clearly that agile and DevOps are also making a big difference in allowing companies to improve the atmosphere for their workers—a huge benefit when you consider the shortage of talent in IT today, and how much it typically costs to attract new employees, just as DORA’s researchers noted.

    Other key findings by Coleman Parkes include “before and after” metrics that many organizations are observing related to their continued adoption and advancement of the involved methodologies themselves.

    I encourage you to download the entire report, and leverage it to measure how far you’ve come with Agile and DevOps transformation—and where you may need to re-examine your efforts.

    — Aruna Ravichandran