DEVOPSdigest

We recently shared several quotes about the importance of DevOps Capability Assessments from DevOps Institute Ambassadors. The insights explored the complexities of ways of working, the importance of completing DevOps assessments as part of the DevOps transformation, and how a good assessment examines the challenges and highlights the potential for an organization on a DevOps transformation journey.

Today, we have several additional quotes that illustrate the importance of incorporating an Assessment of DevOps Capabilities into any DevOps journey. See what additional ambassadors have to say:

Maciej Jarosz
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Poland, Warsaw

"DevOps capability assessments are important as they provide a way to compare our practices, processes, technologies, security and business culture to an industry benchmark.
Capability assessments allow people from different backgrounds to have a unified approach and a shared vocabulary of terms, words and concepts to enable fruitful collaboration. To avoid miscommunication, ambiguities need to be minimized. A good way to minimize ambiguities is to run a DevOps capability assessment. It ignites conversations and inspires ideas for interventions and workshops where they are most needed to accelerate a DevOps journey."

Tracy Bannon
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Pennsylvania, USA

"Having a measurable and discernable understanding of your DevOps abilities is akin to having a decent health physical so you can meet your own fitness goals. Until you have the labs done, compare against your doctor’s observations, your own understanding, and your health goals, you really have no way to accurately plan a way forward. You can use some popular ideas, exercises, diets, and supplements but the end will often be ineffective and unsustainable. Assessments provide the details needed for an organization to create an achievable roadmap. At the end of the day, organizations still need to answer the originating question of why; Why do they want to be on this journey? Coupling a capability assessment with a clear definition of imperative sets the stage."

Deepak Dinakaran
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Dubai, United Arab Emirates

"No matter the size of your company or team, innovation is key to survival. For organizations to thrive, they need a foundation that determines progress and growth. It can be difficult to measure growth or maturity as time progresses. Questions like: "What was my baseline compared to where we are now?" are hard to answer. DevOps capability assessments can provide answers in a holistic and detailed manner so teams can start benchmarking against themselves and their peers, laying the right path to achievable goals."

Anurag Sharma
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Amsterdam, Netherlands

"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." DevOps capability assessments facilitate the collection and analysis of evidence-based, actionable data and insights to organizations. This brings clarity to focus areas and strategic vision, enabling organizations to refine their vision and create specific, measurable goals for better value delivery."

Abderrazak Dahmani
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Paris, France

"DevOps brings fundamental changes to the way application delivery and operations teams interact and carry out processes and tools. It requires changes to technology, processes, and culture, and change at this level can be challenging if not addressed in a systematic manner. But it’s hard to know how to approach DevOps. DevOps capability assessments provide a platform to assess DevOps strategy, identify the DevOps capability of core development and IT operations processes, determine standards and automation for continuous everything, and define measures and metrics for successful DevOps adoption."

Garima Bajpai
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Ottawa, Canada

"During 2020, consensus built from leading consulting firms, researchers, start-ups and enterprises that software-driven companies can reap benefits from enhanced adoption of DevOps practices which can translate into faster deliveries. However, it is not difficult to comprehend that more needs to be done in times where DevOps practices are still evolving to tackle the need to assess flow, feedback and experimentation alongside the newer challenge of scaling DevOps. Continuous governance, data-driven focus on DevOps practices, evolving security posture and increased adoption of AI-driven capabilities are key next steps in the journey. DevOps at scale is not achieved by a single DevOps practice, process or toolkit. We need to continually assess the direction, progress and evolve our approach. Assessments provide a consistent view of current capability and a continuous improvement landscape. It acts as a motivation to keep the scoreboard ticking in the right direction for the team and organization as a whole."

Leonardo Murillo
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Heredia, Costa Rica

"It's impossible to know where to focus and where enhancements are required without a solid methodology that enables us to inspect processes, technical solutions and organizational structures and dynamics. DevOps has wide reaching implications within an organization. It is not just about the technology, nor just about the communication or culture; it's actually a combination of many small (and sometimes not so small) practices, mindsets, technologies and team behaviors applied in organization-specific ways that, in concert, produce an ongoing and valuable evolution. Assessments are an indispensable tool to gain that insight, they can provide clarity into next steps, strengths to leverage, weaknesses to focus on, and a roadmap to prioritize scarce resources. However, when thinking about DevOps and digital transformation in general, a lot of organizations focus on "maturity". There's a resolution gap that usually lingers after a lot of maturity focused assessments, due to the complex structures that are aimed to be reflected in relative broad "maturity" buckets. Maturity is, after all, achieved through individual capabilities, and this is where a capability assessment shines: improve your capabilities, and your maturity level will unavoidably, evolve."

Andre Shojaie
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Montreal, Canada

"A DevOps transformation is a complex challenge for an organisation. It involves people, processes and tools. Knowing how you are succeeding in delivering value to customers is essential and dependent on how you are approaching transformation. A key factor to observe the evolution of your organization, and how customers are impacted by the changes, is the effective measurement at different times of your DevOps journey. This also ensures you are navigating in the right direction. This is what a DevOps capability assessment does: tell us our current state, shines a light on future state and helps to establish success criteria. It allows the evaluation of capabilities with the goal of accelerating the flow of value to customers."

Hatem Odeh
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

■ "We have a project mindset, not a product mindset."

■ "Our path to production is full of manual steps."

■ "Dev productivity is hovering around 40%."

■ "It’s unclear whether teams are building the ‘right’ thing."

"Those are few samples of common challenges that companies struggle with in software delivery. Determining the shortest and most reliable path to your business and IT goals through DevOps is complex. DevOps capability assessments are the antidote to sluggish and ineffective ways to measure where you are now with your DevOps journey. They bring best-in-class insights and practices to address common challenges, and help to quickly define an execution plan designed to iterate and evolve along with the needs of your business."

Niladri Choudhuri
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Bangalore, India

"DevOps is a journey of organizational continuous improvement that aims to co-create value faster, more safely, with more stability and happiness. When we follow directions on a map, we must first identify the destination, and then the starting point. We have the objective. However, most of the time we do not know where we are. If neither point is defined properly, we face many challenges on our journey to the target. DevOps assessments provide a way to define current state accurately and then identify the short term and long term improvements. This helps organizations to find the best route towards their goal, have a clearer idea of the challenges to expect, and be prepared for it."

Learn more about getting an Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC), the new tiered professional membership model at DevOps Institute or expand your DevOps knowledge at the next SKILup Day conference.