Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
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 3, 2022
This post has been excerpted and adapted from the 2022 DevOps Enterprise Forum Guidance paper The Role of the Platform by Satya Addagarla, Josh Atwell, Mik Kersten, Thomas A. Limoncelli, Sara Mazer, Steve Pereira, Jeff Tyree, and Christina Yakomin.
To achieve a productive and sustainable flow of engineering effort, find a happy medium between too much restriction and too much flexibility. Having too many restrictions can lead employees to shortcuts around the rules, while having too much flexibility can lead to complexity and a lack of resource coverage. It is important to have enough stability and predictability to allow for clear management and to minimize chaos and duplication of effort, while still allowing for innovation and employee autonomy.
We have provided numerous recommendations on how to design and develop standardized platforms for developers and the teams that support them. When applied, they should provide a framework for greater work productivity. There are two important considerations that exist throughout our recommendations for platform standardization:
Even when considerable effort is applied to provide robust and effective standardized platforms, everyone involved should recognize the need for the platform or system to change to meet evolving needs. These changes will be most effective when done in partnership with the developers using the platform and when providing them with specific frameworks to aid the evolution of the platforms they use.
Platforms should provide a path to experimentation, customization, and evolution.
To facilitate experimentation, as described in Sections 1e and 2b of the full Role of the Platform paper, the platform should provide open access to suggest improvements so that developers can:
To facilitate customization, the foundations of a platform should be small, composable, and have interconnected components like APIs. Developers can:
To facilitate evolution, a development platform should be paired with a management platform to provide feedback on performance that can inform improvements. Whereas a development platform provides capabilities for delivery, a management platform provides observability into the work performed within the development platform and beyond. It can capture issues and allow for informed decisions on how development can best evolve.
Two terms for development and management platforms have emerged from Gartner’s analysis of the platform ecosystem: value stream delivery platforms (VSDP) and value stream management platforms (VSMP). The two work together to support action and observation.
In general, we recommend that platform development consider the following guidance:
Once an organization decides to roll out an internal development platform, it is important to have enough stability and predictability to clearly manage the effort, minimize chaos, and reduce duplication to continue to allow for innovation and autonomy. Here we provide a set of recommendations to achieve a successful rollout, starting with an MVP, treating the platform like an open-source project, taking an API-first approach, and managing the platform like one would manage external products.
By standardizing on a platform, an organization should be able to achieve the following business benefits:
Finally, a capable platform can be defined and built once and then leveraged across the entire organization. A platform improves onboarding and offboarding, access, confidence, focus, flow, and joy. It provides a mechanism for elevating engineering across the organization when improvements are made and features are added: a rising tide that raises all boats.
To read the full set of recommendations, please download the full Role of the Platform paper here.
CIO Home Lending at Wells Fargo
Multi-disciplined marketing and technology leader who has moved from hands on technology to leading marketing and advocacy teams to improve customer enablement and engagement.
Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open-source code that is still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since that time, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built.
Thomas Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, system administrator, and DevOps advocate. He manages the SRE teams at Stack Overflow, Inc., and previously worked at Google, Bell Labs/Lucent, AT&T, and others. His books include Time Management for System Administrators (O’Reilly), The Practice of System and Network Administration (3rd edition), and The Practice of Cloud System Administration. In 2005, he received the USENIX SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award.
No comments found
Your email address will not be published.
First Name Last Name
Δ
We had an amazing conference in Las Vegas this August — I learned so…
Quiet down, everyone. It’s pop quiz time! But don’t worry—there are only two questions;…
Organizational transformation is more than just a buzzword—it's a necessity for survival and growth.…
In recent years, the concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has gained widespread adoption…