What would you do if your teams could release multiple times per day without impacting quality? Try out new features? Respond first to market events? Handle bugs fixing without waiting for a major release?
Companies who achieve noteworthy Digital Transformation (e.g. Netflix) prioritise culture, processes, and value delivery to customers coupled with a focus on fast, frictionless delivery, and rapid deployments to Live – they rarely start with tools.
This smooth and fluent value delivery comes from a Continuous Delivery approach – where new features, configuration changes and bug fixes get into production safely, efficiently and sustainably.
Here are five questions to get you started:
- What’s the business goal? Where IT may get excited by efficient software delivery processes; the business is motivated by making and selling more, adding services or cutting costs. By understanding these goals, IT can drive and support the culture change needed by the business.
- What do you need from IT? If IT and the business jointly focus on outcomes (winning competitive advantage, expanding market share, lowering costs) IT can create the steps (releasing a new feature or product, integration with partner offerings) to make new initiatives a reality.
- How can you build a shared process that aligns IT with the business? This process should involve: ●Breaking down ideas and features into small packages of work that can be pushed through the delivery pipeline quickly and safely to Live ●Focusing everyone on eliminating friction and improving quality. Doing so establishes trust, uncovers how long it takes to get features through the system and enables proactive problem fixing.
- What happens after go-live? Getting products through UAT to users is a major milestone, sometimes accompanied by stress, last-minute fixes and unexpected bugs when software hits real-world users and data – but it’s not the final destination. Building aligned processes makes it easy to deliver change quickly and without panic or human error. Using a rolling roadmap lets you continue to release after the initial go-live and supports evolving business goals. Supplementary questions include: ●How (and how quickly) can you capture and respond to user feedback? ●What is your mean time-to-value for new features, bug fixes and configuration changes? ●Where is the friction in your end-to-end process, and how do you make those transparent?
- Can you try out ideas safely? Being serious about Digital Transformation involves engaging users and understanding their needs. This means testing the viability of ideas on real customers as part of the delivery process rather than a technical “Proof of Concept”. Doing so makes it easier (and safer) to get successful PoCs/Pilots/features into Live.
A process of astonishingly fast Product Delivery
At Estafet, we’ve developed Boost – an adaptive Product Delivery Platform that tackles these questions and gets organisations to Product Delivery astonishingly fast. Backed with significant automation and delivered as an Operator on OpenShift (Red Hat’s Kubernetes PaaS), Boost lets you tailor your environments and delivery process according to each product. The UI lets you track features (rather than code) through your software delivery chain, giving stakeholders a consistent view of the process from idea to Live.
We chose Red Hat OpenShift because it offers:
- The most feature-rich and secure Kubernetes distribution
- A standardised way to create, manage and deploy software across all applications, technologies and platforms
- Self-healing applications
- Hooks for DevOps tools for efficient Product Delivery implementations and enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-managed containers, on-prem and on any major cloud platform
Boost takes OpenShift from a fantastic tool to a mechanism for incredibly quick Product Delivery. In one example, we helped a Fintech build a Blockchain integration application deployed across Dev, Test and Production environments on OpenShift with full automation in just four weeks. Boost’s automated processes and best practices let the team of competent Java devs (with limited Kubernetes experience) consume OpenShift easily and focus their energy on building features.
Changing how teams work and providing the right tools accelerates Digital Transformation so that:
- All teams focus on getting value (new products and features) Live within a matter of weeks
- Each team can deliver containerised microservices effectively, spin up new environments as developers join, and update environment configuration and delivery pipelines as the project progresses
- Friction is eliminated at every step from Dev to Production monitoring
- You build production-ready code from Day 1.
Boost your Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation via Continuous Delivery could revolutionise how you engage with customers and deliver products and services, but it doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. Our simple steps – from Readiness Workshop to Rapid Start engagement – help you achieve this, getting your team from standing start to Product Delivery on Red Hat OpenShift within just six weeks and giving your Digital Transformation a Boost.
