Gain a Competitive Advantage by Asking the Right Questions to Speed the ‘Idea to Delivery’ Process
It is no secret that one of the many results of DevOps is Speed! Many are looking for ways to inject speed into the process of ‘idea to delivery,’ converting feedback from customers to response, and so on. These are all impactful to both the business as well as customer satisfaction.
Often, when talking with customers about DevOps they’re puzzled about where to start. Which project? What process? What product? What team? More often than not we spend more time trying to convince them to not point speed in the direction of a bad project or bad process. We challenge customers by telling them to not scale those bad processes, making them go faster and proliferate. But quite honestly, we seldom ask ‘what are you doing right, just too slow!’
Although speed and scale can be pointed in the direction of current products or new products and high performing teams or middling teams, I am not so convinced that it is always the best place to start. Sometimes it is good to magnify a company’s strengthens in their business process and adopt the mindset that if it isn’t broke don’t fix it – just make it Faster!
Case in point:
While attending this years’ DevOps Enterprise Summit I listened to a company describe how they pointed speed at a service product that was customer facing. The service was already working well but by better deploying DevOps processes they were able to increase the product service turnaround by 50%.
There were some simple processes behind the scenes that they made faster that allowed them to better leverage the tools they had at their disposal. Yet, there were no new products offered and no new features enabled to bring about this outcome. However, they saw an increase in consumption and customer interaction directly impacting their bottom line from what was essentially the same old thing but no longer the same slow thing! By looking at something that was not broken through a ‘DevOps Lens they were able to ask how they could make it faster – both via process and technical enablement. They added speed, and they are killing their competition as a result.
So again, why is Speed so important? Simply put there are instances when even a little faster can make a world of difference to your customers! The right speed kills…. your competition!
Forty8Fifty Labs offers DevOps assessments and workshops that can help. See just what and where to add speed to processes and how to leverage the right tools to create the right speed for your business. Learn more here.
