SD ReFocus - DevOps Services

Customized DevOps Advisory and Coaching Services

Advisory for DevOps Leaders and Teams

Imagine a World Where Dev and Ops Become DevOps
"Imagine a world where product owners, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Infosec work together, not only to help each other, but also to ensure that the overall organization succeeds. By working toward a common goal, they enable the fast flow of planned work into production (e.g., performing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of code deploys per day), while achieving world-class stability, reliability, availability, and security."
- The DevOps Handbook, 2nd Edition by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois & John Willis

Digital and DevOps leaders can drive DevOps initiatives to build high-performing teams and demonstrate their impact on the bottom line.

Our DevOps approach is based on real-world experience within a software company, as well as consulting and support for transformation initiatives for clients of various sizes and sectors since the emergence of the DevOps movement fifteen years ago.

To ensure the success of these engagements, our experience leads us to recommend a few structured steps. However, we are flexible and willing to work with you to co-develop services engagements suited to your context and constraints.

Please contact us for a free consultation to discuss how we can help you benefit from these types of initiatives within your organization.

Fundamental Building Blocks of Your Digital Transformation

Digital leaders and teams are under increasing pressure to deliver more value, faster, with higher levels of quality, security, and reliability.

Traditional practices and organizations can no longer respond to current challenges and uncertainties. Silos must be broken down at all levels (organizational, work, information, tools, objectives and incentives, cultural, etc.) to streamline the flow of value at the desired speed of development and stability in production.

Teams that have mastered these DevOps principles, practices, and technologies are able to deliver better, faster, more customer value at a sustainable pace. In other words, these high-performing teams are able to achieve the first principle of the Agile Manifesto!

DevOps initiatives can deliver a range of benefits, from operational excellence, speed and quality of delivered software, to customer experience and outcomes, team satisfaction, and increased competitiveness.

Proven Small Steps to Success

Our customized DevOps advisory and coaching services are based on small steps rather than big bang transformations, which are often doomed to failure.

The proposed value-driven steps help DevOps leaders overcome common pain points that hinder the success of their initiatives:

Clarify the strategic vision of the initiative (its purpose).
Ensure that everyone understands and shares the intended objectives and their measurable contribution to the company or product strategy. This requires an understanding at all levels of what a DevOps approach is, how it can be applied in your particular context, and how it relates to other change initiatives (agile, SRE, ITIL, VSM, etc.).
Quickly understand the current situation.
Work with leaders and teams to holistically assess the current ways of working in their various dimensions (organization and roles, SDLC and practices, tools and technologies, culture and leadership, skills, metrics and performance).
In particular, value stream mapping workshops can help focus the analysis on identifying the organization's main bottlenecks and measuring the performance baseline without getting lost in too many details.
Define a future target state to be achieved, for example in two to three months.
Rely on a collaborative approach involving the various stakeholders in defining intermediate objectives and taking ownership of the step-by-step resolution of major roadblocks.
Draw inspiration from lessons learned in the field so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, while ensuring that you adapt this expertise to what really matters in your context.
Implement improvements to remove obstacles one by one and measure their impact.
Implement improvements through successive experiments while measuring their effects on targeted performance. Studying progressive results allows you to quickly adjust the course of your initiative and demonstrate contributions to outcomes for both customers and the company.
Support large-scale adoption across the company
Moving from pilot projects to large-scale deployment requires the implementation of complementary practices. In particular, it may be appropriate to set up shared platforms with teams responsible for their creation and evolution. Communities of practice (COPs) can also be effective vehicles for fostering the sharing of experiences.
Engineering and Product leaders need to visualize the value stream network with its information and work flows.Without this, bottlenecks and slowdowns between teams continue to congest the delivery of potential value to customers and impact to the company's bottom line.

As mentioned in the descriptions of our approach, our services are tailored to your context and objectives. They draw on extensive expertise in software engineering, the application of this know-how in a variety of situations, and key communication and training skills to ensure the success of such initiatives.

Beyond the Technology

While DevOps initiatives without tools or CICD pipelines would not make sense, their scope is still too often limited to technological engineering and the roles of DevOps engineers.

However, extensive feedback from companies and studies such as Accelerate and the State of DevOps Reports show that their success depends primarily on the involvement of all stakeholders (business and IT), the alignment of the initiative with business imperatives, the commitment of senior management, and skills development.

That's why our services are human-centered and value-driven, defining and implementing improvements whose impact can be measured and demonstrated.

Recommendations

"I had the pleasure to work with Patrice who helped our agile and DevOps transformation.

Very attentive to the client's needs, he is aware of the context and constraints in which his mission must take place."

Florent Barth
Head of IT Department

"I really appreciated the way he guided me through a complicated DevOps transformation plan.

He was able to bring a vision that fit the scale of our Ministry. I recommend his approach and his expertise in this field."

Olivier Thiébaut
National DevOps Project Leader

"Operational experience in development coupled with DevSecOps methodological hindsight is Patrice's niche.

We co-published IBM's white paper "DevOps, et si c'était vrai? " in 2019. Value stream mapping, DevOps culture and implementation hold no secrets for him!"

Justin Derbyshire
Chief Digital Officer

"Patrice is a DevOps/ALM expert and his expertise is essential to gain the trust of customers. In addition, Patrice has very good listening and communication skills, which are essential to fully understand the customer's needs.

Finally, Patrice is easy to work with and has a strong team spirit, so that the work is done in an efficient and professional way."

Bertrand Baronnier
Software Sales Representative

Whether you're considering it or have already launched your DevOps initiative, let's talk about it!

Contact us for a free consultation to discuss how we can help you benefit from these types of initiatives within your organization.