The business value of DevOps

Venue.sh

20th February, 2024

6 min read

Venue.sh

20th February, 2024

6 min read

Ready to implement DevOps? Here’s how to demonstrate the business value of DevOps and win the support of leaders and decision-makers.

Adopting a DevOps philosophy in your organisation can help you find actionable answers to fundamental business questions such as ‘How can we improve product delivery for our customers?’ and ‘How can we change our product to meet customer needs?’

By answering these questions businesses can improve sales, revenue growth, profitability, product line, and customer satisfaction—which feed back into business results.

It’s clear that DevOps is more than a buzzword for automation. Although DevOps is not an overnight fix;it requires organisation-wide transformation including changes to culture, high-level investment, and short-term disruption. So, it’s common practice that to implement DevOps you’ll need to build a case to win the support of leaders and decision-makers.

In this blog, we will investigate the business value of DevOps, highlighting information you can use to make your case to leaders and decision-makers. We will consider the benefits of DevOps and the cost of disparate tools, and we’ll factor in practicalities such as platform requirements. Let’s get started.

The business value of DevOps

Before undertaking a big digital transformation like DevOps, decision-makers need to know if it’s worth the risk. A good starting point is to demonstrate some of the positive impacts of DevOps.

Here are 4 key benefits of DevOps:

1. Rapid deployment

DevOps enables you to deploy new processes, applications, and systems at a much faster rate. Cross-team collaboration and task automation (two essential components of DevOps) increase efficiency and therefore increase deployment speed.

2. Better, faster problem-solving

DevOps processes accelerate the entire development process, providing teams with quick feedback on features to reduce the response time to feature requests. It reduces the complexity of the development process and enables teams to solve problems at a much faster pace. Your teams can respond quickly and solve issues when they arise.

3. More room for innovation

DevOps streamlines processes and improves business efficiency, with task automation playing a key role. It frees your team to concentrate on meaningful tasks instead of repetitive or menial ones.

They can spend time developing new ideas, improving processes, and bringing new software products and features to market. Staying close to your customer requests and changes in the market is fundamental to delivering value and staying competitive, so the more time you can dedicate to innovation, the more likely your business will grow.

4. Team morale and motivation

DevOps fosters better collaboration and communication amongst developer, technology, and executive teams. It helps improve and strengthen relationships, increasing workplace motivation and happiness. Employee happiness is positive for many reasons, and its impacts are felt in multiple different areas of the business.

A happy workforce is more productive and able to provide better experiences for colleagues, customers, and partners. Additionally, it impacts an individual’s ability to be productive and encourages creativity and innovation.

The cost of disparate tools

From hindering efficiency to impacting data accuracy, disparate tools can cost a business greatly. According to Gartner’s Data Quality Market Survey, businesses lose on average $15 million annually to decisions based on inadequate data.

The right tools will harmonise the way you do DevOps and allow you to collect data in a meaningful way. Using this data, you can budget, plan, and report effectively.

So, what’s the problem with using disparate tools?

Efficiency

It’s becoming more evident that developer experience is crucial to business success. Disparate tools can cause lengthy, disjointed processes for your developers, which negatively impacts their happiness and ability to focus on work that matters.

These non-beneficial or excessive steps are not only costly—they also draw away time from tasks that can enable your developers and the wider organisation to progress.

Wasting time and resources

Organisations with divergent tools can spend unnecessary time and resources on upgrades and maintenance. It’s time that could be spent working on more important, innovative, productive, or creative tasks.

Data inaccuracy and poor decision-making

When your tools aren’t working together, it’s difficult to gain a holistic perspective of your business performance and operations. It can result in unreliable or inconsistent information, which is the basis of risky, impulsive decisions.

Alternatively, accurate and reliable data forms the basis of all solid decisions; you can use it to pull reports across departments and make informed decisions.

Only fools rush in—understand your platform requirements!

DevOps is a long-term investment. If you can maximise its impact, an investment in DevOps will enable you to operate your business more effectively, drive innovation and creativity, and boost team productivity.

You can get a better understanding of your platform requirements with a value stream assessment. By understanding your current software development value stream, you can fuel progress in software delivery performance. A value stream assessment is an approach that looks at:

Your lines of business
The processes used to create what you are producing during the software development process (for example, source code, binaries, or dependencies)
The time it takes for processes to reach a place where they can be used to generate revenue, retain existing customers, or produce business efficiencies

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