To Successfully Adopt Continuous Delivery, Organizations Need To Change

In a recent Forrester Research report, Modern Application Delivery Demands a Modern Organization , Kurt Bittner, John Rymer, Chris Hines and Diego Lo Giudice review the differences between the 'modern organization' of yesterday and today and the shifts that need to be taken to keep up with not only customer demand, but the success of more agile competitors.

Bottlenecks

When you look at the structure of a successful organization, it is rare to find silos of any sort. The reason being that when you shift the emphasis from individual performance optimization to a team-based structure focused on optimizing delivery, you get faster output. Why?

When an individual is focused on their own task lists, priorities slip for other projects that get held up. This ultimately creates a bottleneck of work. What is the natural thing you may do when you are waiting for someone else to do the next step of a project or be told to do so from a superior? You start something else. Because you are working on some new project, a new bottleneck is formed when your resources are needed. You are not available any longer and someone is now waiting on you. They start a new project while they wait and so on and so forth.

The Culture Shift

We are members of a culture of multi-tasking – we must always be busy. This is not always good. In the modern culture, resources are dedicated and at the ready to move projects along, even if they are underutilized. So now you have resources that are not moving on to new projects and are ready when their resources are needed.

Now going back to the silo vs. team approach, we start to see less specialization and more focus on distributing knowledge. So now you have a team that can be the next in line instead of one person. It’s now about cross-functional teams vs. superstars.

The focus also needs to change. Our culture wants us to get the Employee of the Month award and achieve personal objectives but what if we focused less on how much we could get out of top performers and more on how much output we could deliver to our customers?

This would mean another huge cultural shift and this time it’s about the management team. Management must be agile and allow for teams to make decisions quickly without having to cut through yards of red tape to get something across the finish line. It’s more about holding your team accountable vs. tracking and monitoring their every move.

The report concludes by stating: “While process and automation are essential enablers of these better results, organization culture, structure, and management approach are the true enablers of better business results.”

Continuous Delivery can be a tremendous game changer for your organization but the organization needs to be modernized in such a way that it will be a successful game changer.

Christina Pappas
Marketing Funnel Manager
CloudBees