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 author quickly removed the post after a battering in the comments and across 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 “agile thought leader’s” message, which is why it quickly disappeared.
How Could a Large Company Become Agile?
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
- Measuring agile is difficult.
Companies tend to organise themselves by Business Unit, 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 Maturity
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 that understands how organizations build upon IT Systems & Platforms. Each system consists of building blocks that span:
- 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.
Introducing the DevOps Cube
Using this method of measurement, which the enov8 platform already captures, 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.
