100% Agile within a Year – The DevOps Cube

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SEPTEMBER 2017 by Niall Crawford

An interesting article I spotted on LinkedIn this week:

[Bank] to be “100 per cent Agile” within a year, says senior coach

Interesting for a few reasons, one – the post was quickly removed after receiving a battering in the comments section and across general social media and secondly because these “agile at scale” comments are a pet “bug-bear” of mine.

Saying that however, I probably must also assume that the excitable author may have “partially” miscommunicated the intended message of the “agile thought leader” and thus why the article was quickly swept under the carpet. Nevertheless, it did get me thinking. How could a large company, like a bank, be 100% agile? And how could they prove it? I see two fundamental challenges or truisms:

Companies are federated

Companies tend to be federated, by Business Unit or Platform and of course teams. This of course has certain benefits, however, it also means “mileage” can vary. Some teams have good leaders & smart engineers, other poorer divisions less so.

Measuring agile is difficult.

Counting the number of agile coaches is not a realistic method and organizations rarely have the necessary statistics (past baseline information or accurate real-time statistics) to demonstrate they have accelerated delivery timelines, increased change volumes and continue to provide quality. With this objective in mind, I set a challenge for the team to come up with a solution, using our own Enov8 Platform, that our clients might use as a method, in part at least, to measure their IT maturity & agility. The result after some brain storming was the “DevOps Cube”.

An approach based on understanding the organization is built upon IT Systems & Platforms. Each system is made up of building blocks that span across:

IT Environment Tiers i.e. infrastructure, applications & data
IT Environment Operations e.g. build, deploy, test (& maybe secure).

They also have different maturity levels from Chaos to Defined to Automated to Self-Service.

Using this method of measurement, which is already captured with the enov8 platform, an organization can determine at a granular level whether a system instance has CICD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) capabilities and review it at a more holistic level e.g. by Platform, Business Unit or Enterprise.

Enov8 will be providing the DevOps Cube with their Environment & Release Management solutions. Request a demo, or contact us for more information about the enov8 platform.

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