Companies making big bets on DevOps can make those bets pay off sooner, and more efficiently, by partnering with CloudBees’s Professional Services group on their implementation plan. It’s critical to know where and how to start, how to measure and communicate results, and how to prepare for what’s beyond. Our 10+ years of experience helping organizations of all sizes and complexity has taught us that the best way to get up and running quickly is to have a comprehensive implementation plan that includes the following:
The right goals, metrics, communication channels, and resources in place
The right team members, prepared for the journey, and a set of clear expectations
The right infrastructure ready and in place
An expectation of what’s coming and options for adapting to those changes
Our Professional Services team will help you:
Get your team started quickly with training and assistance on modeling your current processes, environments, applications and tool chain, and how to adapt that automation as your needs change.
Get the visibility into your processes so all stakeholders have on-demand updates, traceability, auditability, and compliance.
Implement an extremelyreliable system that gives you control over your releases at any speed and scale without requiring exponential human resources.
One Size Does NOT Fit All
It’s important to note that DevOps is a journey of continuous improvement and learning, not a destination. CloudBees’s Professional Services group will work closely with you to ensure your success, by building your team and community to reach your unique goals. Prescriptive implementation plans that promise two weeks to value for every customer are not based on reality. The number and complexity of use cases, time lines, and resource (both live and with power cords) availability all affect timelines. We regularly do two-week implementations but those are commonly based on a single use case, for a small team, with limited automation and reporting. The bulk of our customers prefer an implementation plan based on the realities of their use cases, scope, and unique processes.
How We Do It
We’ve been doing this for a long time, so we have a proven process to ensure our customers’ success. The length of time for each step will vary, but the order and objectives stay the same. We will work with you to ensure your needs, timeframes, and goals are an integral component of the process.
Build and prepare the team
This is the single most important step. We begin by identifying and agreeing upon the Business Sponsors, stakeholders, Implementation team, metrics, uses cases and communication channels. This is key to ensuring alignment across the team on the vision, plan, and criteria critical to the success of your CloudBees Flow implementation. This step also includes training the team on the product, so they can be the internal focal point for on-going CloudBees Flow automation, information, and support. We also analyze your existing automation and processes and prioritize your use cases. This typically takes a week for most of our customers. The size of the initial team and number and complexity of use cases are factors that can affect that time.Prepare the Infrastructure
In addition to your people being ready to release on business demand, your infrastructure needs to be ready, too. This includes installing and configuring CloudBees Flow on your systems, distributing agents, and testing and validating ports and communications. This can be done ahead of time and typically takes a day. Team and environment availability, implementing for high availability and the total number of endpoints are variables that go into the planning.Implement Deployment Automation and/or Release Orchestration
Based on the agreed use case(s), we use the application and environment models developed during training to create best practices deployment automation and a release pipeline. A single use case typically takes a week or two, depending on its complexity. However, every organization’s deployment use cases are unique in some way – it’s their ‘secret sauce.’ That is why there are no black boxes in how CloudBees Flow does deployments. There is no “one size fits all” process, so we allow you to automate your desired process, to perform tasks exactly the way they are needed. As your needs grow and adapt, your automation and pipelines can grow and adapt along with them.Document and Define Next Steps
Once the first use case is implemented, tested and certified, we work with your team to identify the next steps to continue with extending the automation throughout the company. CloudBees Flow is easily extensible, with a rich pool of features to help you both expand existing implementations and on-board new ones. We show you how to use CloudBees Flow’s Domain Scripting Language (DSL) to define the deployment process as code, making it possible to create templates for applications and entire pipelines. Customers regularly use DSL to quickly onboard hundreds to thousands of applications.Go Live, Measure, Measure, Measure and Improve Once the use case(s) is ready, we help your team to go live, putting the automation to work in your environment to release on business demand. You’re “doing DevOps” if you’re constantly improving your processes, and that only happens with data. Once live, we show you how to get unprecedented insight and control of your releases with the data from CloudBees Flow’s out of the box DevOps Insight Dashboards. These dashboards help you monitor your release automation and evaluate how your deployment processes are performing – to go beyond just automation and provide insight into release trends, identifying bottlenecks, and ultimately towards process improvement.
Customer Success Management Hand-Off
CloudBees has a comprehensive customer success program to ensure that your investment in CloudBees Flow and DevOps becomes a vital part of your release process. Once your implementation is running, proven, and showing value, our Customer Success Management (CSM) team will begin working with your implementation team during the Hand-off Phase to manage your long-term support and success.
CloudBees Flow, CloudBees’s Adaptive Release Orchestration solution, eliminates release anxiety by making the process of delivering software consistent, repeatable and auditable. It future-proofs organizations by making it easy to embrace change, onboard new teams and applications, and experiment with what’s new while staying secure. It improves decision-making with comprehensive insight and control across the entire lifecycle. Our Professional Services team gives you a faster return on your investment and eliminates implementation anxiety. Your team gets up to speed quickly and is prepared to improve your processes and adapt to any change or next technologies.