DevOps and Business

Chapter 3. Quantifying Success

Now that you have educated the teams and have established a shared vision for what DevOps would mean for your organization, it’s time to define measurable goals, both organizational and departmental. In this chapter, I provide you with tactics for quantifying the return on investment (ROI) value of DevOps culture changes and implementation.

Organizational versus Departmental Goals

A key thing to remember is that although organizational and departmental goals tend to look vastly different on the surface, departmental goals are intended to support overall organizational goals, and the two must therefore be closely aligned.

Consider a common example: a board mandate to lower Operational Expenditure (OpEx) across an organization. Such a mandate might, for instance, result in a directive for IT to look for cloud alternatives in order to lower monthly hosting and operational costs. However, departmental directives need to be presented in a context of organizational goals in order to offer perspective and avoid incorrect execution. Otherwise, the operations team might decide to switch their architecture to another cloud provider—but without explicit instructions to lower cost, they could reengineer the same architecture with a similar monthly spend. To make matters worse, there is not only an additional labor cost investment associated with the move, but also an increase in error frequency associated with a new architecture, making this initiative a costly ...