Building the Business Case for DevOps

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As agile teams, we’re all too familiar with having our production-ready code sit in long queues, filling out onerous forms and generally waiting what feels like forever to get our code into production. IT operations teams, on the other hand, often feel stuck supporting brittle software. We know that the processes and values behind the DevOps movement hold a lot of promise to address both sets of concerns. But how do you get there? And how do you convince key stakeholders and executives, who work across deep silos in your company (business, IT, operations), to give some of these practices a try?

The first step? Strike the word “DevOps” from your vocabulary. You need to break the problem space down and address meaningful areas, like taking friction out of the deployment process and democratizing operational data.

And the real secret? Build a lightweight business case that appeals to all your stakeholders in terms that they value. Make sure your business case includes a controlled and deliberate investment strategy—proactively identifying the outcomes gained by DevOps—that stakeholders can easily correlate to metrics that matter to your business. Then, watch the momentum build as you start delivering even the very first items.

In this talk, we’ll share how we use classic portfolio management techniques—such as lightweight business-model templates, cost-of-delay estimates and portfolio-investment strategies—to tie actions to outcomes and help you build your own case to change how development, testing and operations can work better together.