“Customer service is the new marketing; it’s what differentiates one business from another.”
The main issues in business are to deliver the newly approved idea to customers in the shortest possible time. In today’s agile world the market is changing rapidly, every minute there are new and upgraded products provided to customers making their life easy and comfortable. When an organization gets new ideas on the requirement of customers it becomes essential to deliver that idea into a product or service at a rapid speed before it wears out or is copied. With agile, we have already improved the mindset and many processes of employees to achieve speed in delivery with quality. But some operations and development processes are mandatory to be done which cannot be skipped. In such cases, it is required to have a mindset to have a continuous value delivery. In SAFe or agile to acquire this continuous value in the shortest time possible DevOps approaches to the CALMR.
CALMR represents Culture, Automation, Lean flow, Measurement, and Recovery. It is a mindset that directs the ARTs toward the high-quality, continuous value streams by managing simultaneous advancements in all the five referred areas. This helps DevOps to achieve the successful anchor approach to unite every aspect of the value streams for getting extraordinary business outcomes. With this CALMR and continuous value stream mindset, we can achieve
Accelerated product time to market
Accelerated learning cycles that decrease deployment risk
Maximizes security, quality, and frequency of product innovations.
Decrease lead time for fixes
Improves solution quality
Improves Mean Time to Recovery
Reduces harshness of defects and occurrence of failures.
Enterprises are always complex systems as they always include diversity in people, technology, processes, value, and policies. So it becomes necessary to cultivate the DevOps with careful and balanced energy directed in every five areas of CALMR to achieve the desired outcomes.
Details of CALMR for DevOps Excellence
Culture
Culture is always the foundation of agile and SAFe. If by following some activities of agile like time boxing, using a whiteboard, and having daily standups, you say you are agile then it’s wrong. Culture is all about sharing, tearing the wall between two, communication and collaborating as one, self-organized teams, T-shaped profiles, and much more. It includes taking end-to-end responsibility and owning it. In DevOps, CALMR approach cultures require below fundamental values
Customer centricity
Collaboration
Risk Tolerance
Knowledge Sharing
Automation
DevOps understands that manual processes are the enemy of speed as it increases the processing time as well as increase the error and defect probability which is a further investment in time due to rework. So the CALMR approach prefers automation of the continuous delivery pipelines. This automation results in decreasing the feedback cycle and accelerating processing time.
DevOps continuous delivery pipeline toolchains involve categories of tools like
Version control
Value stream management
Test automation
Infrastructure as code
CI/CD
Monitoring and Analytics
Vulnerability detection
Lean Flow
Agile always strives for continuous flow, where new features are quickly moved from concept to cash. Three important things help in this continuous and accelerated flow that are
Reduce Batch Size
Visualize and limit work in the process
Managing queue length
CALMR's approach doesn’t mean going for various large changes in a short time but it means applying small and manageable changes.
Measurement
To get extraordinary business outcomes requires the enterprise to have a highly optimized delivery pipeline. What, how and how much to optimize are the main decisions to make in it that also constantly. These decisions are made based on the principles of SAFe and not on the institution. Thus it involves the critical task of accurate measurement of delivery effectiveness and feeding achieved information into improving the efforts. Even though every delivery pipelining and enterprises are different some common metrics can be measured for improvement.
Measuring pipeline flow
Measuring solution quality
Measuring solution value
Recovery
To have continuous delivery with value requires a low-risk release and fast recovery technique from the operation's failure. To achieve this fast recovery some methods in SAFe can be used are
Fast fix forwards and roll back- As the failures in operations are undeniable it is necessary to develop capacity in teams for faster fixing and bring back to the stable state operations.
Plan for and rehearse failure- Teams must beforehand plan and rehearse to reduce the impact and increase the resilience of the failure.
Stop the line mentality-Teams must stop other work and focus on the issue that occurred until it is fixed. This will solve issues in the basic stage and also prevent them from reoccurring.
DevOps principles, practices, and culture are integrated with the SAFe. Good quality programs are always integrated from various sources in agile.
The DevOps transformation requires more planning and forethought but it is worth acting on. “The habit of persistence is the habit of victory” in case of achieving DevOps transformation and CALMR is the guiding mindset for it.
About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.
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