Case
Transforming DevOps to maximise organisational competencies
Challenge
One of the largest infrastructure and media service providers in the UK wanted help to transform their DevOps, for highly responsive competency within their organisation.
Solution
Merapar came on board with DevOps expertise and implemented the following pillars to help the organisation transform how they operate:
- Cultural Change: DevOps requires a fundamental shift in the way teams work together, and this can be difficult to achieve. Developers and operations teams may have different goals, priorities, and ways of working, and bringing them together to collaborate can be a challenge. Understanding that DevOps is far more than a technical discipline has been critical in this journey.
- Start Small: We began with small pilot projects that could be completed within a few weeks or months. This helped to demonstrate the benefits of DevOps and gain buy-in from stakeholders. Once we demonstrated our ability to deliver, then the organisation became more ambitious in its transformation program.
- Be Agile: This is a cornerstone of how we operate. All our staff are Scrum Trained. We deliver change through sprints with laser focus on delivering customer value. We work in Sprints and are always seeking to improve delivery with each Sprint.
- Be informed: All our DevOps staff are AWS Certified to a high level. This enables us to make informed decisions quickly, remaining compliant with internal and industry best practices and standards.
- Be Brave: Affecting Cultural Change and challenging entrenched practices is hard work. Our customers require us to lead the way in delivering transformative programmes.
- Measure Effectiveness: Deploy frequency, Lead Time, Defect Density, Customer Satisfaction, Security Compliance.
Results
- Agile is now formally and widely seen as best practice within the organisation.
- Control of the technical estate has been taken back by imposing Source Control, CI/CD pipelines, and automation.
- We have decommissioned obsolete technical infrastructure and addressed issues of Cloud overspend through process, reporting and accountability.
- Cloud First is now the guiding principle of the organisation and embodied within the corporate strategy.
- Understanding with the organisation has increased through delivery of Merapar ACE training course.
- Project initiation is now swift and effective with a much increased degree of confidence in outcome and delivery.
- Merapar are trusted and respected as a leading force in bringing about cultural and technical change within the organisation.
