Ensure Customer Satisfaction With End-to-End Value Delivery

Today, consumers are more ready than ever to switch allegiances if they feel their expectations are not being met, so you need to ensure that they receive end-to-end value reliably and predictably. In the face of increasing complexity and market pressure, continuous delivery has provided the answers, facilitating speed, quality, and visibility within the software delivery lifecycle.

While continuous delivery was implemented from the get-go by start-ups and smaller software houses, large-scale enterprises have been slower to the punch. For them, the wake-up call only arrived after seeing unicorns beat them in the marketplace, push competitors into oblivion and cause widespread disruption. They were forced to sit up and take note.

Furthermore, there is overwhelming evidence to support the case that failure to embrace new technical capabilities has a measurable negative impact on business. And this is not just the short-term reduction in sales and revenue caused by release delays and missed deadlines. Long-term prospects are also undermined; excessive amounts of manual tasks, unplanned work, wait time and technical debt diminish innovation and competitive edge.

Becoming Value Stream Focused

The first step an organization must make on its continuous delivery journey is to establish itself as being value stream focused. After all, how can you identify the parts of a process that can be optimized if you can't see clearly see what you're getting out of every step, and understand how each task relates to the next? Given all the complexity in the enterprise-multiple apps, dependencies and releases-understanding the business impact of any changes is crucial; visibility and advance notice of any potential clashes or conflicts are key to dynamic delivery.

By managing the whole value stream, you can ensure innovations reach users in a rapid, predictable manner-with clear visibility of progress and any potential bottlenecks. This informs you of the business impact any change or update will have, enabling you to deliver services in fast and agile fashion, without sacrificing quality. With CA Continuous Delivery, you gain insight into where each feature and story is in the release pipeline and can track them independently or grouped.

Of course, this necessitates that you have visibility into team plans, their dependencies, and any conflicts amongst what they do, so you can measure progress holistically. As such, you should look to define dependencies within your workflow that enforce deployment in the right order and can be scheduled based on maintenance windows.

Indeed, scheduling is vital, and you should look to implement a solution that can synchronize multiple releases to a regular cadence, and define common milestones to ensure dependent functions progress in tandem. Throughout this process, the business cares what user stories are in the pipeline and their status, so you must be able to track their progress.

All of this has to happen in the context of enterprise governance and work management. Therefore, as part of the initiative, you should look to govern with role-based access and approval gates. This will include integration with work management tools (Jira, ServiceNow, Agile Central), and the complete automation of business process flows.

Essentially, when looking for a solution to help you begin your continuous delivery journey, being value stream focused should be a priority. This is why CA Continuous Delivery has been designed to allow you to:

• Track value streams end-to-end
• Plan for dependencies and conflicts
• Schedule release trains
• Govern with role-based access and approval gates

Tune in to my next blog post as part of this series, which will explore the importance of model-driven releases in the enterprise.