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Sep 18, 2023 devops Twitter GitHub info@caci.co.uk
The promise of DevOps against Waterfall was always around accelerating your Application Development and Infrastructure Operations velocity in delivering features, stability, capability and uptime when compared to traditional, linear practices. However, much of that promise erodes if you aren't continuously measuring - and benchmarking - your organisation's processes, procedures, frameworks, tooling and culture against your competitors.
DORA Quick Check is a way of quickly assessing your organisation against your peers, and a great way of acting as a corporate level of self-reflection on where your teams are, where you want to be, and what challenges you really face. Let's dive in to what that means for you, and what insights DORA can offer you to make you more effective IT Infrastructure performers in your field.
Performance is the ultimate differentiator
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is the largest and longest running research program of its kind, that seeks to understand the capabilities that drive Software and IT Delivery and Operations organisation performance and act as a basis of comparison. In our Consulting engagements, we often see many similar organisations with similar working constraints operating in completely differing organisational context and constraints, which can lead Senior Engineering and Executive questions similar to:
"Are we fixing Incidents as fast as our competitors?"
"Do we have the same level of {Competence XYZ} as our competitors?"
"Is our Team Size right for the Infrastructure Size we have?"
DORA - backed by Google Cloud - helps teams apply those capabilities, leading to better organisational performance - or at least, a better awareness of how your wider Industry Vertical is dealing with similar challenges. There are two key DORA tools offered to allow you to compare against others:
- DORA DevOps Quick Check
- A quick check toolkit of questions to enable your to compare to industry peers, identify specific capabilities you can use to improve performance or make progress on your IT DevOps Team goals
- DORA Core
- A body of well-established findings across the history and breadth of organisations which have completed DORA studies, and which acts as the data set to back and validate the comparisons that DORA Quick Check provides
DORA is a fantastic set of tools and knowledge to compare yourself to the rest of the industry by responding to five multiple-choice questions. Compare your team’s performance to others, and discover which DevOps capabilities you should focus on improve.
Get Better at Getting Better
At its heart, DevOps is an offshoot from the Agile Manifesto's mantras around:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a project plan
All of which effectively equate to the idea of building a faster flywheel by ensuring the flywheel itself is getting faster and more efficient. In relation to DevOps, this actually means ensuring that the practices themselves - i.e. the notions that DevOps has, and the practices and processes which are used within - are timely, relevant and performant. DORA themselves identify these as four key metrics to measure the two core areas of DevOps; speed and agility. These four metrics are:
- Deployment Frequency
- Lead Time for Changes
- Change Failure Rate
- Mean Time to Recovery
Future Predictions based on Past Performance
Each year, DORA survey over 30,000 IT, Infrastructure, Network and Cloud Professionals around the world in a variety of Industry Verticals in their Accelerate State of DevOps survey. There is a wealth of insight that can be obtained from these reports, often surprisingly-so for a free report and very honest in insight.
The main approach we find of the DORA approach and State of DevOps Report is around the data-driven way they are presented, with rich metrics in varying areas of DevOps practice, some areas to whet your appetite:
- Software Supply Chain Security
- Drivers of organisation performance
- Software and Infrastructure Delivery for operational performance
- Five metrics of delivery and operational performance
- Cloud usage and adoption across industry peers
- Site Reliability Engineering practices in DevOps Service provision
- Continuous Integration versus Continuous Delivery approaches
- Organisation culture and application to Westrum culture group framework
The SODR Report handily ranks organisations in terms of Elite, High, Medium and Low and contrasts their performance in a quadrant-approach of areas, as well as using the data derived to show key insights and "surprises" from the datasets gleaned. We find talking to our Clients similarly to accurate, researched and discipline data points helps us to quantify their DevOps and SRE (Site Reliabilty Engineering) practices to laser-focus on areas for improvements in their Infrastructure and related IaC development team performance, and pull these back to wider business outcomes.
Helping you to Accelerate
At CACI Network Services we're well versed across all areas of IT Infrastructure - be that IT, Delivery Assurance, Cloud, Network or DevOps and Systems Administration. Our expert Consultants have worked across a large spectrum of Clients in varying stages of Digital Transformation; some with adherence to more Agile-led Delivery Lifecycle, others with adherence to more Waterfall-led Delivery Lifecycle - and have experience across a plethora of Industry Frameworks, from TOGAF to SAFe to more traditional ITIL deployments.
Get in touch and let us help you assure and stabilise your Cloud, IT or Network Infrastructure to fulfil the four key DORA DevOps metrics in your company and accelerate you to DevOps and SRE success!