So, what about the soft costs? The things we
can’t seem to measure. Nicole Forsgren of Chef
conducted research into this topic and has
shown that companies that have high-performing
DevOps teams are twice as likely to exceed
their financial goals such as profitability and
market share. To assess if your organization
fits this criterion, you need to look at three
criteria:
- deployment frequency,
- lead time to deploy and
- mean time to restore.
If you score high in all three of these
criteria, then statistically speaking, your
financial performance will be much higher than
if you scored low in all three criteria. In
short, there is a very high correlation between
DevOps and financial performance and that has
been proven even without doing all the
complicated DevOps calculations. Stop using
that hammer!
Peter Drucker has said, “you can’t manage
what you can’t measure.” When it comes to
DevOps, management needs to take a more
aggressive role in quantifying DevOps events.
This may seem unimportant when you are fighting
a deployment nightmare but when it’s over the
damage needs to be assessed. When we measure,
we create accountability and when people become
more accountable they immediately seek ways to
improve. Without this, you become a victim of
DevOps Groundhog Day where you wake up every
day repeating the same tasks as the day before
until you feel hopeless. But if you do measure,
learn, and adjust, then the next day will be
different. Just ask Phil!