System, Value, and Decision failures bring the grinding wheel to a halt
As put by a Quality guru, People in general, more than 80% of the team are, in fact, productive and efficient. The problem then is with the chosen few who have an efficient short-term view but high-risk performance focus. By all means helpful except what it takes to future proof the organisation and make it relevant for the global Technology trends, Value focus and System-driven reorientation are the need of the hour for such subsets of the Project Management ecosystem.
The definition of a Project based Organisation becomes important here:
"The Lean, Sophisticated, Commoditised, Less “Silo”ed, Product platform based organisation that is “Value” focused and “System” driven."
The grinding wheel and its gears get increasingly rigid with increasing manual failures and a lack of sophistication to leverage the knowledge and skills of their teams.
Skilled resources are aware but need access to smaller incremental deliveries, which grants them the inbuilt flexibility to correct, fix, redesign and reorient the product delivery plan more quickly and frequently with limited risk, more sophistication, and more discipline while automating a large portion of the IT operations mechanism to continuously Integrate, develop and deliver the product over a secure gateway and an accessible cloud deployment.
There is an urgent and ever-increasing need to shift Project Management from “People or Delivery Management" to a holistic Management of a Productised platform, Automation and integration of tools for incremental iterations. Delivery or Productivity is then more or less explicit, definite and assured. The 7th edition of PMBOK consolidates the Project Management Practice into a “Value” delivery and systems-based approach. This means that the delivery metrics of CPI and SPI are not as relevant and important anymore as the focus on an integrated approach to deliver value to both internal and external stakeholders.
Metrics and the Measurement dynamics under the 7th Edition of Project Management Practice
Exploring the Measurement of Metrics for System focus, Value delivery, Story points and Value points (for the Agile or Spotify model followers) indicate the transparency and visibility that the stakeholders can afford in a project Management organisation within an Organisation.
This structure disassembles the cost and schedule-based tracking to overhaul and build a new quantified Life Cycle Assessment system not just for the software products being developed but the Climate Change at a global level and within the Organizational business performance. Simply put, an organization has to enable itself to see beyond the transactional business returns to focus on business longevity and sustaining to connect with globally significant matters.
Also, an engine is set for incremental delivery of a quality code and continuous integration and delivery over a reliable, change-enabled, Lean, Secure, and accessible product platform.
The DevOps recipe
- The Velocity metrics
The dashboard should have continuous tracking of the Scrum Metrics that demonstrate the health of Team understanding and adherence of Scrum Practice, Team Communication, Sprint Learnings and deployment of corrections, Team Velocity.
- The DevOps Metrics
MTTR - Mean Time To Recover - Recovery time from roadblocks and showstoppers
MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures, show stoppers
DDF - Daily Deployment Frequency - Frequency at which the daily code deliveries happen
Uptime - Service, Product, Tool or Platform availability
CTK - Volume of Customer raised Tickets indicating the system uptime and concerns after delivery
UTK - Internal user raised Help desk tickets indicating the stability Maturity and availability of the IT infrastructure
PP-Performance Pulse - Availability and SLA compliance of the Services, tools and infrastructure indicating the Continuous compliance to the control limits, standard deviation and other quantitative indicators.
- Mandatory training to the Teams on DevOps
Induction and reorientation of the organisational workforce to agile mindset and speedy delivery performance criteria. Analytics and metrics indicate the organisational migration effectiveness towards digital maturity.
- The DevOps components
- Cloud Computing platform
- Virtualisation platform
- Containerisation
- Test and Build Systems
- Configuration Management and Infrastructure Management
- Automated deployment of Application
- Monitor, Alert and Trend
- Logging
- Process Supervisor
- Security
- Collaboration and Ticketing
- Orchestration
- A sample toolset for the DevOps environment could consist of the following
- Kubernetes - A code merge robot
- Ansible - A Machine easy and Human-friendly IT automation system
- Habitus - for incremental updates to the docker build
- Openstack - To build your clouds
- deployer - An out-of-the-box deployment tool
- Puppet - Server automation framework
- Chef - systems integration framework for configuration management of the infrastructure
- Fabric - for remote execution and deployment
- Kong - to invoke and manage serverless APIs
- Sentry - for cross-platform crash reporting
- Vagrant - to build and distribute the development environment between platforms, for local and cloud distribution
- Netdata - for Distributed real-time performance and health monitoring
- JIRA - communication enabler for distributed development teams to collaborate
- Veracode - for application safety from threats
- Supervisor - for OS services Management
- Loggly - Logs for application issue detection and resolution
- Dockers - for containerisation with the filesystem to run and automate deployment
- Jenkins - for continuous integration and continuous delivery by automation
- AWS - for faster software development and improved application scalability
Summary for the baby steps toward Digital Readiness
In summary, the success of a DevOps deployment is dependent on the triple constraint of Lean, Scrum and an automation toolset on lines similar to the above list. Added to this would be the team capability and organisational drive and urgency for sophistication towards digital maturity from capability and availability.
A Life Cycle Assessment of the integrated software components provides visibility to the internal compatibility of the components and the contextual products under development, scope and delivery commitments. A Life Cycle Assessment of the hardware, support system and infrastructure components is in increased focus as part of the global climate change and sustainability focus. A Project Management Plan document is taking a new design and shape. An incremental update to the traditional PMP (Executive) is of less relevance in the increasingly Digital Reality of Project Management of the CI/CDD realm as we are seeing it unfolding.
