As the pace of technological innovation increases and digital disruption becomes the norm, the need to adapt and accelerate IT service management (ITSM) processes is more critical than ever. It’s no longer a debate about whether ITSM and DevOps should interface; ITSM professionals must now understand how the practices they use to co-create value can either support or undermine the flow of work and pervasive automation in a DevOps environment. It’s easy to understand why ITSM professionals are skeptical about DevOps. ITSM performance metrics and service level agreements (SLAs) often revolve around the IT organization’s ability to mitigate risks, minimize impact, and “guarantee” availability. While these measures have value, sacrificing speed, agility, and innovation can negatively impact the business. Even with the evolution to ITIL 4 , the what and why of ITSM haven’t changed. A customer-focused culture in which everyone understands how they contribute to the co...

The Service Value System (SVS) and Service Value Chain as indicated in ITIL 4 Best Practices give you the big picture macro view that should be the start of every DevOps Pipeline . Without it, you could get swept into the undercurrent and potentially focus too much effort or misdirect resources towards the technical and automation aspects of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).  Components of the SVS include:  The ITIL4 Guiding Principles, Governance, The Service Value Chain, Practices, and Continual Improvement. A Service Value Chain and Value Stream Mapping (VSM) exercise provides all stakeholders with a high-level view of the end-to-end steps required for your DevOps Pipeline. Applying the concept of “Systems Thinking” to the overall CI/CD Pipeline is critical but without including the information/data and flow of work we truly miss the mark. This is where Lean  principles and VSM are helpful.  Notice in the above image fr...

There are high performing organizations in the world that are exceeding speed to value, safety, and reliability expectations and they are provisioning co-created services fast .  Not there?! That is ok, you are not alone. I think that we all agree that we must at least be on that journey. Service providers should be capable of generating and sustaining relentless improvement with high velocity for the conversion of demand to consumer value. The ITIL 4 High Velocity IT (HVIT) certification  course explores the ways in which digital organizations function in high-velocity environments. We must move fast, and we have to do the right things fast. Velocity not only refers to speed but also to direction! Understanding these operating models helps practitioners, leaders, and organizations to improve and succeed. The ITIL 4  High Velocity IT   module and certification course  incorporate known and working practices  that focus on the rapid delivery of prod...

Continuous Delivery Architects are engaged in the design, implementation, and management of DevOps deployment pipelines. This infers the inclusion of all tools and tech to support Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, and even Continuous Deployment.  Subjective viewpoints and misunderstandings of what is involved and how to orchestrate a pipeline can lead an entire organization in the wrong direction. Every “Continuous Delivery Architect” should consider formal education and certification to ensure that they do not proceed in error. I see in practice that the emphasis is on the tooling and although that is a key element, even more critical is the process flow, the APIs, and the inclusion of practices to ensure things like security, compliance, and resilience are built into the orchestrated automated pipeline. Let us not forget the importance of CULTURE and the role that plays. There are three primary ingredients for continuous delivery: ...

Originally Published on the DevOps Institute Site One of the most interesting trends in DevOps adoption is the evolution of the IT silo into the cross-skilled squad. This is not just a semantical name change. Most IT teams today are comprised of like-skilled individuals such as a Scrum team of developers. The modern squad takes a slightly different approach, is more static than dynamic and is more product-focused than project based. Squads are built around T-shaped professionals –where each member has a specialty competency, but all members have a broad scope of skills across multiple disciplines. A high performing squad essentially has all of the skills needed for the product or feature to which it is assigned and is not generally constrained by the availability of an individual resource. There is enough breadth of knowledge inside and outside the squad to shift more activities to the left so as to allow them to move more quickly and with more agility. While the squad model ori...

One of the most frequently stated key takeaways from DevOps Foundation Certification Candidates is the big AAH-HAA moment when they realize the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. Terms matter and the context in which we use them can make or break the success of any DevOps pipeline for digital transformation . Which one of these you select for your organization will have a significant impact on the way you orchestrate ­­­­your DevOps Pipeline and your Continuous Delivery Architecture. It will most definitely help to define the appropriate tool pipeline, determine how you will utilize and program those tools for automation and will have an impact on the context of your communication plans to your stakeholders. How will you approach integrated testing? There is not one element of development and delivery that Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment will NOT impact. Therefore; It is critical to understand what they are, how they are the same, how they...

What is your biggest challenge when trying to increase the flow of work through your DevOps or Continuous Delivery Pipeline?   In a recent conversation an IT Director laughingly said that his greatest challenge was that they can not get the development “Divas” to recognize that change approval and compliance requirements are necessary and that it takes time. I chuckled as I thought to myself what those development “Divas” were thinking.   Maybe their thoughts were that those paranoid risk adverse Change and Compliance process people do not understand that we need to get this work to the finish line and we need to go fast.  Sound familiar? This is not an uncommon issue.   The us-vs-them environment, if not corrected, will continue to disrupt IT service delivery and therefore, business performance. We must recognize that DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) do not stand alone.   It is not just the tools and automation and, although it i...

Agile Software Development is very well known and practiced in most organizations today in order to respond quickly to the ever increase in demand for IT Services.  Many of these organizations, while making some improvement, are not seeing the outcomes they had expected.  Why is this?   We are applying Lean methods, cycle time is increasing and yet, unplanned work, delays in deployment and unstable production environments remain. Consider the time from idea to delivery as the “ Value Stream ”.  Through this Value Stream, we want to increase the “Flow of Work”.   We will never see the type of optimization that is required unless we look at this Value Stream as a whole.  Applying Agile, Lean, and even tools in development without integrating Change, Security and Operations will break down and decrease the Flow of Work. DevOps helps with this idea.  Many companies, both large and small, are attempting to integrate the development and ...

With the onset of practices such as DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Rugged Code, and Value stream mapping, is ITIL / ITSM Best Practice still relevant? The short and emphatic answer is YES! Let’s look at how ITSM Best Practices are relevant and enable some of the initiatives that are in the foreground of Service Management for many contemporary IT organizations today. DevOps – DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that focuses on communication and collaboration to ensure a balance between responsiveness to dynamic business requirements and stability.   Therefore, things like Lean and Value Stream Mapping, practices like Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, all become a subset or a building block to a successful DevOps initiative.  DevOps is frequently an organic approach toward automating workflow and getting products to market more efficiently. Ok, if we can accept that then the next question is … What are you going to automate?    ...

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where software is always in a releasable state.   Teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.  By relying on automated testing and deployment, as well as ensuring collaboration and communication between development and operational teams (DevOps), the goal of building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently can be achieved. This approach can help to reduce the cost, time and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications and configuration items (CIs) into production.  A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery and will be critical for operational processes such as Change Management and Release and Deployment Management to be agile and robust in the DevOps environments where continuous delivery will be part of best practices.   Continuous Deliv...