I get lots of questions from clients about how they can improve their DevOps “maturity.” It’s a fair question, but there’s a bit of a flaw in the premise behind it, and that flaw is the notion that there’s an end state for an evolving DevOps practice. Yes, you can certainly improve a DevOps practice in all three phases: people, processes, and platforms. Yes, there is a certain level of maturity required to embrace all three phases, but please don’t fool yourselves into thinking there’s an end state.

Forrester’s Perspective On DevOps

We’ve published a lot of DevOps research over the last year or so. From the current state of DevOps to where it is going, we’ve covered it:

  • The Future Of DevOps. If you’re just coming up to speed with DevOps, perhaps your engineering team is already engaging in DevOps, and/or, as a leader, you’d like to gain some background, by all means, read the report to learn why CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs see value in growing their DevOps practice and the impact that they see it having on their businesses.
  • The Forrester Guide To DevOps. If you’re engaged in DevOps and need a review of the fundamentals, read this report, in which we break down the major aspects of DevOps with a guide to the ins and outs of the discipline.
  • The State Of DevOps, 2022. If you want to understand the current state of the DevOps landscape, this data-driven report evaluates the success of DevOps-related initiatives, including transformation, challenges, technical practices, release frequency, and more.

From Adoption To Excellence

Our most recent report, How To Go From DevOps Adoption To DevOps Excellence, is for organizations that are already engaged in DevOps: They are already seeing value, they have aspirational goals to further improve and scale their DevOps practice, and, most importantly, they don’t place artificial limits on where they can take their practice. This report describes the habits of highly successful DevOps teams and offers some practical advice as to how organizations might cultivate similar practices.

Top-Tier DevOps Organizations Reject Artificial Limits

So how does one go from adoption to excellence? Big picture: Reject false constraints. Artificial limits such as “We are a bank — we can’t use Netflix as an example” or “We are in a regulated industry — we can’t do product experimentation” or “We need to build a DevOps practice before we can employ VSM metrics” … all of these things are artificial limitations. The reality is that not every company needs to be like Facebook or Netflix, but learning and adopting high-end practices and technology can be done within any industry engaged in software development.

Want More?

Conversations with clients are at the core of our research. If you want to learn more about DevOps, we’d love to hear from you. If you are a Forrester client, reach out to schedule a guidance session or inquiry.