Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Trevor Quinn. I'm the container practice lead for Red Hat Consulting North America. I'm Eric Sauer. I'm a senior architect on Trevor's team. So, Eric, we're going to be talking about DevOps and digital transformation today. What are some of the challenges or opportunities with the way organizations are implementing DevOps currently?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so tell me if you've heard this one before. You go to your company meeting or your town hall. There's a lot of energy around technology and how it can be used to create a competitive advantage in your marketplace. Leadership gets up on stage or, you know, in front of the camera and they say, we're going to do DevOps and we're going to adopt Agile and we're going to take all of these great new modern practices. We're going to put them in place at our organization and really knock the ball out of the park. But then kind of that message trickles down to the implementation teams and they're really confused and lost as far as what they actually need to do or change about what they do to align to that overall vision.

Speaker 1: So how do organizations move beyond statements like this? How do they get serious about DevOps and get teams aligned and committed?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so first off, I think leadership really needs to be willing to support this kind of this idea of a bottom up approach where the teams are empowered to make decisions, problem solve and really kind of figure out what this means for them. But in order to stay aligned, you know, and keep things from going into chaos and also to prevent, you know, kind of boiling the ocean as far as there's so many things within the DevOps space and the Agile space, so many tools in the toolbox and behaviors and ways of working that it can be kind of overwhelming. So what leadership needs to be able to do is provide these kind of broad target outcomes that have a defined end state and kind of a finite amount of time around them, but set goals that are measurable, where we can find some form of metrics to be able to track progress on these target outcomes over time and know when we're done. Trevor, are there metrics in that space or are there target outcomes in the DevOps space that we know of today that we can use as a starting point for this?

Speaker 1: Absolutely. One of the books that we're really excited about right now is the book Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim and Jez Humble. And what the authors have done through a long term study is they've started to examine this link between DevOps practices and organizational success. And they've started to get really specific about what are some of the causal factors that determine organizational performance. And what they've found is that software delivery performance in particular is a key driver. Having identified that, they're then moving down a level of detail and starting to start to identify specific software delivery metrics that are making a difference. And what they found is that four in particular lead time for change, deployment frequency, mean time to restore and change failure rate are really good causal drivers of organizational performance. And when we talk about performance, we're talking about not just commercial performance, things like profitability, revenue generation, etc. We're also talking about non-commercial performance. So things like customer satisfaction, market share, things like that.

Speaker 2: Cool. So what is Red Hat Consulting doing to kind of provide some guidance to our customers on how they can move down this path?

Speaker 1: Several things. So first of all, we have an approach called metrics driven transformation, where we're using these metrics to inform large scale program scale adoption of technologies like Red Hat OpenShift. So we're actually thinking about and starting to work with organizations on things like visualizing these metrics. So literally creating a dashboard where we're going to be able to show each of these metrics graphically and be able to show teams how the activities they're engaging in are actually making a difference in these indicators over time. And then moving beyond that, we want to work with those teams on those specific practices. So things like telemetry, monitoring and alerting to help teams understand how they can make improvement in these metrics over time.

Speaker 2: Yeah, sounds really interesting. So if customers are interested in hearing more about metrics driven transformation, they should reach out to their Red Hat account rep or go to redhat.com slash services to start a conversation. Thank you.