Why Product Companies Cannot Succeed with just DevOps – they need BizDevOps !

Despite all of the buzz around DevOps, and all of the software development challenges it aims to overcome, not every organization is reaping the benefits of DevOps as envisioned.

Although DevOps represents a tectonic shift in the way software teams operate and function, it falters with respect to integration with business management teams. While it does bridge the gap between development and operations teams, it doesn’t solve the problem of siloed development. operations. and business management teams. This is where BizDevOps comes into the picture; it brings the silo walls down. In the BizDevOps world, business teams not only set requirements, they also work directly with developers to set priorities for development sprints. In fact, the development, operations, and business teams work together, in unison to solve problems and achieve business goals.

1. How are product organizations typically structured?

Product organizations have long been operating in a very traditional fashion; each team is only responsible for activities within their scope and hardly ever interacts with other teams. This approach prevents teams from gaining insights into the tasks other teams are performing, where exactly they are in the product life cycle, or exactly which problems they are solving for customers.

This is how product organizations are traditionally structured and operate: 

1. The product management teams present the product strategies and business cases to the business team.
2. The business team, in turn, allocates a budget for tools and resources.
3. The product management team provides a product roadmap, requirements, personas, and priorities to the engineering team.
4. The engineering team defines the efforts that will go in, and the technology that will be required. Engineering also builds the product and maintains a knowledge base.
5. Once the product is ready, the product management team shares the marketing strategy, target segments, value proposition, pricing, and sales strategy and also training material with the sales and marketing teams.
6. Through various channels, the sales and marketing teams approach customers and markets, returning with insights into the product through VOC, market research and competition info.
7. If there are any custom requests, the sales teams share them with the product management teams.
8. For any questions or issues, customers get in touch with the service team, who then resolve the issue. If there are any field issues, the service team gets in touch with the product management team to have them rectified.

2. Need for effective communication and collaboration

With the pressure to deploy new releases frequently, product-based organizations will need to break the shackles of traditional application development and move on to modern approaches that encourage increased communication and collaboration.

Effective communication and collaboration are required, not just between development and operations teams, but across all teams, including engineering, product management, sales and marketing, service management as well as senior management.

Communicating in this manner ensures that:

• All teams are on the same page with respect to customer requirements, resource needs, effort estimates, timelines, budget, coding and testing challenges, as well as customer feedback.
• Development tasks are aligned with business goals, and accurately connect the dots between DevOps metrics and business KPIs.
• DevOps teams and business teams work towards the same goals and every small deployment is in alignment with the bigger company mission – so every feature is developed as per the needs of the customer.

When business teams work in tandem with DevOps teams, the combined efficiency can help drive better outcomes and continuous input from business teams can drastically reduce rework for DevOps teams.

With BizDevOps, developers and operations teams become an integral part of the decision-making team; they get to strategically plan the development of a product, and also execute it. This feeling of ownership is a great motivator, and also allows for easier mobility towards leadership.

3. Need for cross-functional business processes & integrated tools

As the demand for working software to be made available increases, product organizations need to build software in ways that allow it to be released into production at any time. To achieve enterprise agility, the software development assembly line must be continuous.

This requires organizations to embrace continuous delivery along with continuous development, integration, deployment, testing, and service. A continuous assembly line speeds up the software delivery process and enables easy and assured deployments into production. By developing software in short cycles, it shortens the feedback loop and enables teams to make iterations quickly and more efficiently.

Integrated Release Management and Integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) along with automation are just as important to achieve continuity. By covering the entire value stream – starting from initial customer request to delivery – cross-functional business processes and integrated tools ensure teams work together through improved collaboration, communication, and integration to generate value for the customer while judiciously balancing the available resources.

4. The benefits of BizDevOps

The concept of BizDevOps (or DevOps 2.0) is already changing the way companies develop and deploy new software. As deployments are released in near-perfect alignment with the company’s overarching business goals, the software that is developed more closely meets customer needs.

• Through continuous delivery, the speed and flexibility to develop products is greatly increased, allowing teams to identify mistakes quickly, fix them instantly, and build quality products.
• Since everyone working on the product is aware of and updated with the tasks of other members, applications can be developed quickly leading to faster time to market.
• As all teams work together in harmony, issues can be instantly rectified, and feedback instantly incorporated for increased responsiveness to customer needs.
• Real-time insights through the use of analytics tools into application performance, end-user behavior and other key KPIs.
• With the communication and collaboration barriers between customer service team and other teams significantly reduced, organizations can resolve issues quickly and proactively and drive inclusive customer service management.

5. Drive better application development outcomes

With some of the most successful organizations embracing DevOps to improve the application development process, organizations across the software industry are looking to drive operational delivery excellence. Yet, many of them struggle to get the most out of their DevOps investments mainly due to the silos that exist between DevOps teams and business teams.

With development teams creating code, operations teams managing it, and management teams reviewing it, for Business KPIs in silos there is limited collaboration between teams. Today, product companies can no longer succeed with just DevOps; they need BizDevOps to bring everything and everyone from across the organization together to build reliable, high-quality software quickly and easily. By bringing business, development, and operations teams together and coordinating efforts as a single team from start to finish, BizDevOps ensures the application is perfectly aligned with the business objectives and delivered rapidly.