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Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
LLMs and Generative AI in the enterprise.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
New half-day virtual events with live watch parties worldwide!
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
November 1, 2021
This post has been adapted from the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Forum guidance paper by Satya Addagarla, Anderson Tran, Mik Kersten, Rob Juncker, Betty Junod, and Sasha Rosenbaum.
Alright, you’ve come a long way on your journey to the cloud. You’ve pitched to the executive board, planned your journey, and become organized. But migrations take a long time. When it’s time to execute your move, choose your OKRs correctly and be ready to adapt to change.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are the currently popular goal-setting framework used by many successful enterprises. An OKR consists of a clearly defined goal (objective) and three to five “key results”—specific metrics used to track progress toward that goal. OKRs propagate throughout the organization and help make sure that employees at all levels are aligned on what the primary goals are and what measurable outcomes will get them there.
Enterprise-wide cloud migration is an initiative that is likely to span multiple years. One of the most important tasks as you go into the planning stages is choosing the right goals and milestones for the project. The incentives you choose for executives and middle management will, to a large extent, dictate the results you get. Choose wisely. As Leonard Sherman writes in If You’re in a Dogfight, Become a Cat! “the trouble with incentives is that they work.”
For example, take a look at the following key results:
The first key result is the most appropriate if the main business objective of moving to the public cloud is moving out of the on-premises datacenter to save costs. The second is the most appropriate if the main goal is improving the agility of the IT department. The third fits if the goal is to improve the high availability of your customer-facing applications and so on.
While the public cloud offers many benefits, it is difficult to realize all of them at once. Measuring the organization on the wrong metrics will drive the wrong outcomes.
Make your OKRs as outcome based as possible. For example, the SLA OKR (the third in the above list) states an outcome that is clearly valuable to the customer and the business, so aim for those at the organizational level. In contrast, OKR 2 is important for the Dev and Ops team in support of OKR 1.
Ensuring that you have the right kind of OKRs for the various levels of the organization helps drive activities toward the outcomes that support your business case. At the top-level of the organization, having business and customer centric OKRs (such as improving the speed of innovation as measured by flow time) is critical.
Another benefit of OKRs is that they assign clear deadlines and measure progress toward it, connecting technology activities to business outcomes. In many cases, enforcing a strict deadline on the cloud migration process, such as the date of the on-premises datacenter lease renewal, can speed up the process.
Lastly, as with any large-scale initiative, it is crucial to track and celebrate short-term wins. As John P. Kotter writes in Leading Change, “Transformations sometimes go off track because people simply don’t appreciate the role that quick performance improvements play in a change effort.”
If we are only tracking the progress toward the finish line, which may be months or years away, we are likely to lose momentum as people across the organization get discouraged by the seeming lack of progress. Therefore, it is important to track progress on at least a monthly basis and reward short-term successes along the way.
As you are approaching application migration, it is useful to use an appropriate assessment framework, such as the 5 Rs (repurchase, rehost, rearchitect, retire, retain). Having a framework allows you to classify applications and use pre-defined criteria to select the migration approach. There are multiple versions of this framework; the important part is to select the R’s that support your IT strategy and standardize on a consistent set of migration criteria across the enterprise.
Generally, applications fall into one of the two broader use cases after the cloud migration: applications that remain mostly identical in functionality and number of users as they were on-premises, and applications that become Software as a Service (SaaS).
For instance, if you had an enterprise-wide web application for HR benefits management, its functionality will largely remain the same after the move. In such a case, the move to the cloud either won’t affect the amount of IT time spent operating the application or may reduce it due to cloud efficiencies such as auto-scaling.
On the other hand, you might have an application that was offered to external or internal customers for self-installation that is now becoming SaaS. For example, most large retailers have a portfolio of custom applications developed in house. Pre-cloud, such applications were installed and operated by local staff at each store. With the migration to the cloud, many of these applications are now offered as a SaaS tool to all of the store locations, potentially globally, and maintained by the central IT.
If an application is transformed to SaaS, it is now central IT’s responsibility to deploy, upgrade, and maintain it. This can drastically increase the number of Ops/SRE resources dedicated to the application and is likely to require a different skillset. Modern SaaS services are expected to operate with upward of 99.95% SLA, which translates to less than five hours of downtime a year, including planned maintenance. Meeting high standards like this usually requires changes to the CI/CD processes, on-call structure, and even software development practices.
The migration effort is likely to span multiple years. During this time, cloud technology will evolve, the global IT landscape will advance, and your company priorities will change. It is important to keep pace with technology advancements and organizational priorities and realign the migration OKRs on a quarterly and yearly basis.
Aright, you’re almost there. But the journey isn’t quite over. Before we end this series let’s take a look at omni-cloud versus multi-cloud.
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