| | JUNE 20188CIOReviewBy Carmen DeArdo, DevOps Speaker, Consultant, Author and DevOps Leader, Nationwide "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." ­ W. Edwards DemingThe basic problem companies are facing is: how to more quickly react to meet the needs of their customers and be competitive in the marketplace. So the delivery system that needs to be designed is one which reduces the time from idea to customer delivery and feedback, which we define as lead time. It is critical that an enterprise agree on this definition because history teaches us that without this type of True North to guide their activities, it is likely the system designed will fall short of this objective.An example of this is the agile implementation in most enterprises. Agile can provide better quality and predictability. But because agile is almost always implemented in the design/develop/test cycle of the value stream, it doesn't provide any true increase in speed of delivery. Large enterprises typically fall into a "water-scrum-fall" model where they still do work as large projects and only go fast through development team iterations.As shown above, this means that there is still a large delay in getting work to the teams and there is also a delay in getting completed development work into production. So while this approach is a good first step, it generally will not reduce end to end lead time.Value Stream FocusWhat's more important is that teams are taught concepts which can help them continuously evaluate what is stopping them from delivering more quickly so that they can identify areas for improvement. Key to this is the lean concept of value stream analysis. If you walk up to a team and ask them why they can't go faster, they will typically say they are waiting for something. They could be waiting for more work to flow into their backlog. They could be waiting for infrastructure needed for development or testing. Or they could be waiting for another team to develop a service they need to consume.Many teams don't spend time in retrospectives talking about how to overcome these types of blockers or wait states and developing counter-measures as continuous improvement initiatives. One reason for this is the lack of objective data that can be analyzed to provide insights on this. This is where the lead time ON THE EVOLUTION OF AGILE TO DEVOPS Carmen DeArdo
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