DevOps practices and tools are focused on speeding up the development lifecycle to get applications and services out to customers. It’s clear that collaboration, visibility, and empowerment are key: DevOps’ success rests on teams being united towards a common goal, having the end-to-end visibility they need to see how they’re performing, and being empowered to improve accordingly.
A data-driven mindset
Ultimately, more productive teams lead to a better work culture. Sure, you want to know how productive your teams are and understand where value is being delivered, but an autocratic approach is not the answer. The key is enabling teams to be more data-driven and helping them see the benefits of using metrics and analytics to make improvements. Then you need to give them the autonomy and ability to make those improvements themselves.
Initially, trust is earned through collaboration and seeing the impact of small wins. But working together isn’t just a mindset shift; it should be Built-into your processes, particularly for widely distributed teams. A more collaborative practice helps eliminate operational inefficiencies and problematic hand-offs, reduces redundant work and impromptu changes, and keeps unnecessary meetings and emails to a minimum.
Tools that provide metrics focused on collaboration can give you insights into how effectively your teams are working together—and give them the information they need to prevent shortfalls in the future. Easy and organised communication means everyone’s on the same page over roles and responsibilities and makes it easier to share knowledge that supports everyone to succeed.
Measuring team success
But how can you know if your teams’ DevOps efforts are successful? There’s no point having a heavily automated CI/CD process with collaboration at its core if you aren’t measuring what’s working and empowering your teams to improve what’s not. Metrics—time-based, quality-based, and automation-based—provide the information teams need to identify bottlenecks, implement changes, measure progress, and keep improving.
Whether you want to save time and ship code faster, ensure that quality doesn’t suffer, or know the impact automation is having on your deployment process, effective value stream management (VSM) helps you and your teams easily identify which steps in your delivery lifecycle are adding value and which aren’t. VSM goes beyond simply taking measurements, to help leverage metrics in real-time, break down silos, and encourage collaboration.
Having this level of visibility and a more rounded view of your metrics is vital. It helps teams understand the time it takes to deliver value to customers, identify waste, and improve flow. On top of optimising processes, it offers insights to support data-driven conversations, helping you estimate value and predict it for the future. But to achieve this, you’re going to need the right tools for your team – and we believe Plandek is the ideal solution.
What is Plandek and how can it help?
Plandek is a best-in-class agile delivery, value stream, and engineering metrics platform that puts end-to-end analytics at your fingertips, embedding metrics into the process and empowering you to improve your pipeline. Adaptavist has partnered with Plandek as part of our efforts to help businesses embrace VSM and enhance their agile and DevOps initiatives. And here are some of the reasons why:
- It’s built on a team-led philosophy that encourages self-improvement, ideal if you’re looking to boost collaboration with metrics that appeal to teams and managers.
- Its dashboards, alerts, and analytics are customisable, so you can tailor the platform to your needs.
- It’s stack—and process—agnostic, pulling data concurrently from multiple on-premises and cloud instances of Jira, Bitbucket, GitLab, and many more, so your teams can work in the way that makes most sense to them.
- With no orchestration required, Plandek is a stand-alone solution that’s focused solely on analytics.
- It’s designed for enterprise-scale and security, making it easier and SAFe®r to analyse data from thousands of employees across a complex organisational hierarchy.
Putting Plandek into action
Plandek supports your teams, managers, and leadership to align software delivery with your wider organisational goals. And our partnership means Adaptavist can incorporate Plandek into our agile and DevOps consultancy, helping provide you with end-to-end analytics for any point in your pipeline, no matter which tools you’re using.
We’re transformation experts with experience implementing and managing some of the biggest tools in DevOps, including Atlassian and GitLab. We’ve already helped hundreds of organisations improve their SDLC with our expert consultancy. From assessing key business challenges to identifying useful metrics and building a unique roadmap, we help get your processes back on track.
Planning for Plandek?
If Plandek sounds like the perfect solution for the challenges you’re facing, we would love to tell you more about this powerful tool and our collaborative approach.
