What is BizDevOps?

Often referred to as DevOps 2.0, BizDevOps builds on the success of the DevOps practice, which accelerates and improves the software delivery process by integrating the efforts of development and IT operations teams. BizDevOps expands on this concept, incorporating business teams and goals into every stage of the software development lifecycle.

Visibility into the software development process gives all stakeholders the ability to lay out business objectives, such as growth and earnings targets, and set development sprints and backlogs. This helps to speed up the process of software development and ensure that development and IT outcomes align with and promote broader business initiatives.

BizDevOps requires a culture of communication and a closed-loop feedback process that quickly integrates feedback into software development. Embracing BizDevOps strategies enables organizations to implement agile workflows, which McKinsey & Company research found to improve operational efficiency by 30% to 50%¹.

Overall, BizDevOps requires a culture that embraces a non-hierarchical structure between business, development and operations teams to enact a digital transformation.

DevOps grew from the desire to speed the process of software development while minimizing risk when deploying new products or features. Before DevOps adoption, development teams often worked on a product or feature for an extended period with little or no input from other teams. What resulted were “big bang” deployments or large deployments of many new features that failed, needed to be rolled back and were costly to fix.

Through greater collaboration, development and operations teams were able to share knowledge and feedback throughout the process, giving all stakeholders greater visibility and oversight. DevOps teams also prioritized the automation of performance management, the testing of new code and the deployment of new features. This strategy made the development process faster and reduced the number of errors and unknowns during product launch.

What was missing from the DevOps process was input from the business team. After long periods of development, DevOps teams were still in the dark about whether the products and features they were developing met the organization’s most current business objectives. A BizDevOps approach addresses this issue, making the creation of products that increase business value a central goal of product development. To do this, business teams must be a part of every step of the development process. With a clear outline of what business problems new products, features and deployments are meant to solve, DevOps teams can more efficiently meet user needs and help achieve business goals.

To implement BizDevOps within an organization, collaboration must start early in the planning stage. The alignment of a clearly defined business strategy with input from the development team leads to the creation of a detailed roadmap for software and application development. Through early collaboration, business value is prioritized, offering time for IT teams to develop product features that meet user and business needs.

Development teams leverage continuous integration and continuous delivery to speed software delivery. Continuous integration is the process where developers frequently integrate code into a code base throughout the development process for automated testing. Continuous integration is key in speeding software delivery; it allows development teams to use automation to continually test new code for quality assurance, reducing unexpected variables and errors at the end of the software development lifecycle. Continuous delivery allows development teams to quickly deploy changes, fix bugs and make updates, including new features and configurations. Automated testing and deployment make updating products faster, reducing downtime and maximizing user experience.

Once a product is launched, real-time analytics help BizDevOps teams monitor performance and analyze if objectives are being met. Through constant monitoring, teams can quickly adapt based on data analytics and product feedback.

Breaking down silos between teams is only possible if business, development and operations teams are clear about their overall product strategy and what metrics will be used to monitor success. To do this, BizDevOps teams must establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that consider business objectives, like profitability, as well as DevOps metrics, into product performance and user experience.

Business teams use KPIs such as time to market—the amount of time that it takes for a product to be conceived and brought to market—profit margins, return on investment (ROI) and growth to measure success. Development and operations teams use performance metrics including:

• Deployment frequency (DF): calculating how often development teams successfully deploy code to production
  
  
• Lead time for changes (LT): measuring the amount of time between when new code is requested and when it is deployed
  
  
• Change failure rate (CFR): the percentage of workflows and code deployments that cause systems to fail
  
  
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): the length of time it takes a team to recover or restore service from a system or product failure

While these KPIs factor into a product development strategy, BizDevOps initiatives must also consider user-driven metrics. Metrics like the product adoption rate give insights into how many users are using the product and customer retention rates track how many users continue engaging with a product after a specified length of time.

BizDevOps teams can use products such as IBM® Instana Observability® to monitor application performance and identify bottlenecks, and for root cause analysis. Performance monitoring tools not only produce real-time product data for analysis, but can also automate the process of remediation, reducing mean time to recovery.

With visibility into key performance indicators and related data, team members gain an end-to-end view of a product’s functionality. This enables them to efficiently build products that meet business objectives and fulfill customer needs.