How Your CI/CD Pipeline Reflects Your Organizational Culture – Part 2
Stage gates reflect silos, broken pipelines reflect skill gaps, fancy slow pipelines reflect obsession with tools over customers.
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 production reflects prioritization problems.
Manual orchestration of release processes reflects the organization's understanding of Agile & architecture principles.
Long-running code merge conflicts reflects some never understood Continuous Integration.
The number of rework, workarounds, and band-aid solutions 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 solving Business & Customer problems.
The team focusing too much on just tools, scripts, code, and policies reflects how they value their customers.
Not measuring flow, customer experience and not learning from feedback reflects that the organization do not know where or 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 reflects that they never understood their priorities & their customer.
Closing Thought
"Digital Transformation is really about the organisation to continuously find new ways to delight customers, making its work easier, and doing it in a way it can sustain long term." – Scott Prugh, DOES 2018