Organizational Design – Teams, Interactions & Flow
The number of stage gates & manual approvals reflects the silos & broken organization.
Long broken pipelines reflect skill, capability, and commitment to solving problems.
Highly decorated fancy slow pipelines reflect an obsession with technology & tools,
not Business or Customers.
Pipelines per environment reflect some never understood Continuous Delivery.
Dependency on key individuals to solve pipeline problems reflect interest and commitment to reducing risk & sometimes managing ego.
Centralized control & CI/CD teams reflect how empowered the delivery teams are.
Technical – Architecture, Design & Practices
The number of outages due to poor architecture, design, code & testing reflects the commitment to quality & customer experience.
Application Code that lives long in the code repository but is not deployed to the production reflects prioritization problems.
Manual orchestration of release processes & the number of meetings for release coordination reflects the organization’s understanding of Agile & architecture principles.
Long-running code merge conflicts and resolution exercise reflects some never understood Continuous Integration.
The number of rework, workarounds, and band-aid solutions to solve SDLC problems reflect the organization’s capacity issue & everything urgent leadership mindset.
Customer & Business Value – Metrics, Learnings & Improvements
Constantly working on pipelines, tools, and plugin issues reflects how much time is available for working & solving Business & Customer problems.
The team focusing too much on just tools, scripts, code, and policies reflects how they value their customers (internal & external).
Not measuring flow also, customer experience and not learning from customer feedback reflects that the organization do not know where to improve and what to improve.
Not having dedicated time for improvements reflects the organization’s interest in “Continuous Learning” and “Continuous Improvement”.
Stream-aligned teams constantly experimenting with new toys (tools & technology) reflects that they never understood their priorities & their customer.
Closing Thought:
I conclude this post with this quote from Dave Farley. Please share, spread – if this resonates with you. Thank you
Continuous delivery is about establishing mechanisms and cultures that allow us to work more experimentally so that we can learn more effectively.”
— Dave Farley, Continuous Delivery
BMK 