Puppet's fifth annual State of DevOps Report confirms and highlights the fact that achieving higher IT and organizational performance is a team effort spanning development and operations — and it’s an investment that can deliver powerful returns.

High-performing organizations are decisively outperforming their lower-performing peers in terms of throughput. High performers deploy 200 times more frequently than low performers, with 2,555 times faster lead times. They also continue to significantly outperform low performers, with 24 times faster recovery times and three times lower change failure rates.

High performers have better employee loyalty, as measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). Employees in high-performing organizations were 2.2 times more likely to recommend their organization to a friend as a great place to work and 1.8 times more likely to recommend their team to a friend as a great working environment. Other studies have shown that this is correlated with better business outcomes.

Improving quality is everyone’s job. 29 percent more time is spent on new work such as new features or code. Employees are able to do this because they build quality into each stage of the development process through the use of Continuous Delivery practices instead of retrofitting quality at the end of a development cycle.

High performers spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues than low performers. By better integrating information security objectives into daily work, teams achieve higher levels of IT performance and build more secure systems.

Taking an experimental approach to product development can improve your IT and organizational performance. The product development cycle starts long before a developer starts coding. Your product team’s ability to decompose products and features into small batches, provide visibility into the flow of work from idea to production, and gather customer feedback to iterate and improve will predict both IT performance and deployment pain.

Undertaking a technology transformation initiative can produce sizeable cost savings for any organization. Every technology leader wants to know what return to expect on investing in a technology transformation. Using key metrics from this report, as well as industry benchmarks, Puppet has provided formulas to help you quantify your potential cost savings using metrics from your own organization. They also provide suggestions for reinvesting those savings to improve IT and organizational performance.

You can download the complete report here.