DevOps Maturity Model - Assessment, Transformation and Benefits

DevOps has transformed the traditional IT industry by changing how teams operate and collaborate in the automation process chain and collaboration workflow. By now, most organizations will have achieved some level of DevOps maturity model implementation in their software journey.

While there are a few in the process of understanding DevOps impact, a few are yet to realize the full DevOps maturity model potential. But the most common misconception around DevOps adoption continues to remain, i.e., ‘understanding it as a journey or a destination’.

This is what the ‘DevOps Maturity Model’ precisely speaks about!

Talk To Our Expert

Understanding DevOps Maturity

By definition, DevOps Maturity is described as a model that determines an organization’s standing in principles of DevOps collaboration journey along with deciding what more to be accomplished to achieve the desired results with the DevOps toolchain.

Understanding DevOps automation adoption ‘as a continuous journey, not a destination’ stands crucial to achieving the DevOps maturity model. The majority of DevOps monitoring solutions are compatible with on-premise, cloud, and containerized infrastructure, which ensures a smooth DevOps transformation culture shift process.

The DevOps maturity model determines growth through continuous learning from both team and organizational perspectives. The more capabilities and skills, the more will be the ability to handle issues of scale and complexities.

As the experts recommend, the organizational DevOps maturity model can be gauged by their abilities in the following four areas:

1) Culture and Strategy

DevOps culture shift must be understood as an approach that brings together different teams, driving them towards a common objective. Transition to the DevOps operating model means a transformation in the organization’s operating culture backed by a set of policies and automation process frameworks. So, that needs proper planning and perfect strategy to execute the agile development.

2) Automation

DevOps Automation is key to continuous delivery and continuous deployment tools in the DevOps collaboration process. By automating repetitive tasks, the automation process eases development, testing, and production in a DevOps Continuous integration/continuous delivery cycle, thus saving time and enhancing resource efficiency.

3) Structure and Process

Modern-day IT functioning is process-oriented and involves processes across all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This has advanced in a DevOps containerization environment, where every stage is a set of procedures aligned with corporate policies and business objectives.

4) Collaboration and Sharing

This is the most critical aspect of the principles of the DevOps culture shift. Collaboration and sharing are key to the DevOps maturity model and teams (in the same location or a different location) will need to calibrate the toolchain and resources toward achieving common goals and objectives.

According to Forbes research, organizations commonly find themselves in one of the following stages as part of their DevOps automation model journey:

Unconscious incompetence: Organizations fail to understand DevOps challenges and its advantages
Conscious incompetence: Organizations still see siloed processes even after 12-18 months of DevOps journey with some automation in agile development.
Conscious competence: After four years of DevOps implementation journey and successful automation, organizations focus on collaboration across teams and streamlining sharing mechanism
Unconscious competence: Here, organizations are all set with structured frameworks, in-depth collaboration, and a concrete automation process for effective sharing.

What Makes a DevOps Maturity Model?

A perfect DevOps maturity model determines DevOps maturity in three ways:

DevOps Maturity Assessment of the current state of capabilities
Identifying areas of improvement
Outlining steps to achieve desired DevOps goals

In line with these three steps, the DevOps maturity block verifies maturity in building, deploying, and testing stages across application, data, and infrastructure levels:

1) DevOps Maturity for Application – Determines DevOps maturity by the ease in code movement from Development to the Production phase. Achieving this requires having builds, tests, code coverage, security scans, and monitoring as automated components of the deployment pipeline.

2) DevOps Maturity by Data – Determines DevOps maturity by the ability to clear paths to automate changes to data and validate functionality regularly, through DataOps.

3) DevOps Maturity by Infrastructure – Determines DevOps maturity by the ability to ease infrastructure using capabilities around automation, streamlining, and enabling self-service to provision environments, among other tasks.

Summarized, the DevOps Maturity model involves five transformation stages:

1) Stage-1: Initial

The traditional environment with Dev and Ops separated is handled.

2) Stage-2: Managed

The beginning of the changing mindset focused on agility in Dev and initial automation in Ops, with an emphasis on collaboration.

3) Stage-3: Defined

Organization-wide transformation begins with defined processes and established automation.

4) Stage-4: Measured

A better understanding of process and automation, followed by continuous improvement.

5) Stage-5: Optimized

Achievements are visible, team gaps disappear, and employees gain recognition.

While these 5 stages make a complete DevOps maturity model, it’s imperative for enterprises to keep checking their maturity at every step, and eventually identify focus areas and ways to evolve in the overall journey.

DevOps Maturity Model: Evaluate Your Current Status and Monitor Progress for Targeted Enhancements

Organizations can utilize the DevOps Maturity Model to gauge their existing state and pinpoint areas that require enhancement. This model also serves as a tracking tool to monitor their advancement as they embrace DevOps principles and practices.

What to Measure in a DevOps Maturity Model?

There are a set of parameters to be measured at every stage of the DevOps Maturity Model to confirm an organization’s level of DevOps maturity. These measures ideally define the direction the organization is advancing in its DevOps implementation journey. They are:

Number of completed projects and the release frequency should ideally high resulting in ROI
Percentage of successful deployments should maintain an edge over unsuccessful ones
Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) from an unexpected incident/failure from the time of occurrence, should be nil or as low as possible
Lead time, from development of code to deployment in production, should be satisfactory
Deployment frequency to determine the frequency of new code deployments

The stage-wise process and the above parameters define an organization’s DevOps maturity success.

DevOps Maturity Model Linked to Security

DevOps maturity model is directly linked to DevOps security. As organizations progress in DevOps automation journey, the competitive edge becomes a pressing demand calling for faster release cycles and digital innovation demands a strong pitch. Development, operations, and security are the three words that make up the DevOps security concept. The objective of this agile development process is to eliminate any barriers that might exist between IT operations and software development.

This is where the challenge of security starts becoming more serious and which is why DevOps culture calls for reconsidering security practices. Eventually, organizations will have to make security an integral part of their DevOps process and take it closer to all application development stages. DevOps experts work with security personnel for early security integration at the maturity level across all parts of the Software Development Lifecycle. This can happen through effective DevSecOps implementation. solutions like Containerization can also help to some extent in addressing issues continuously by limiting the vulnerable resources.

Moreover, Security and DevOps teams can collaborate in applying security policies and frameworks to all the DevOps tools and resources.

Business Benefits of DevOps Maturity Model

Giving a complete picture of an organization’s DevOps team standing, the DevOps maturity model presents a wide range of business benefits:

Faster adaptability to change
Ability to tap opportunities
Identifying areas of fulfillment
Improved scalability
Operational efficiency
Increased delivery speeds
Enhanced quality

More such benefits of DevOps are part of the Maturity model that gives you the ability to witness the full DevOps potential.

DevOps Best Practices

Making the switch to DevOps offers numerous advantages. Despite having innovative approaches to improve the processes, DevOps challenges won’t be entirely new. The following are some of the DevOps best practices

1) Collaborating teams

2) Continuous Integration (CI)

3) Continuous Development (CD)

4) Continuous Testing

5) Customer Satisfaction

6) Effective Leadership

7) Effective Tools

In Conclusion

Businesses must keep in mind that DevOps automation is a long-term commitment and not an overnight procedure as they progress in their DevOps transformation journey. DevOps Maturity model increases your overall organizational workflow, enhances release frequency, and minimizes time-to-market, thus giving you a competitive edge! Want to witness the full DevOps potential through DevOps Maturity Model? ‘Explore Veritis, the Stevie Awards winner for DevOps Consulting services.

Got Questions? Schedule A Call

[WPSM_AC id=13925]

Related Posts:

DevOps Maturity Model – From Traditional IT to Complete DevOps