Establishing a business case for DevOps

"The case for DevOps makes itself," said a panelist

Getting the business onboard to begin DevOps, which represents not only a significant change in culture, but in workflow, can be difficult. A panel of experts speaking at Computing's DevOps Live event yesterday agreed that the best way is to start small and understand the objectives.

"At first it was something we thought we could do at scale," said Dean Bevan, Lead DevOps Engineer at Lloyds Banking Group. "Naturally, that didn't work; you've really got to understand the nuances across the team… Always build that business case at the smaller level, don't try and go big; and tailor it."

Tripta Kershaw, Head of Portfolio, Programmes and Project Delivery at Hermes UK, has been tailoring the business case for DevOps at her company for two years, ever since it began its digital transformation.

"It was really a transformation where we aimed to replatform the Hermes UK technology infrastructure… We looked to replace legacy, we were introducing APIs. Our business case was really high level, in that we didn't quite know the pace of what we were doing or how we were going to go about it, we just knew that we had to deliver a number of business outcomes and business values and business objectives that were set right at the top.

"In the two years the business cases have evolved, because we've always gone back and reviewed them; I'm finding I'm actually taking business cases to every monthly board… We've come on a lot in two years, and those business cases have evolved from being very waterfall, with dates that were probably not realistic at the time, to iterative, very incremental releases with deliverables, where the board actually sees the value in what we're doing."

Julian Burnett of IBM had a different view. He believes that it is more important to do DevOps "only when you need to - don't try to invent a reason." On the bright side for those teams who are stuck with waterfall delivery methods and can't wait to move towards agile, "The reasons are many and varied."

Continuous delivery is, to an extent, the foundation of DevOps, and it changed IT forever, removing the "big gate" that used to stand between code and production. Teams that want to make the DevOps business case must understand what that means: "You step into a world where pipelines of change are coming at you from all over the place; some from within your own resources, and some, increasingly, from outside - maybe SaaS providers or platform providers.

"Managing that confluence of change in an orderly fashion - suddenly you need to do DevOps. It's not a choice. The case makes itself."

Making the case for DevOps is not as simple as wanting to speed up processes, or even improve quality: it is an enabler for those, but will not provide those outcomes by itself. Before starting with DevOps - said Nic Whittaker of Virgin Atlantic Airlines - "you have to understand the outcome your business is after."

Understanding those outcomes will enable you to build a better, more comprehensive business case and plot the path towards them.