State of Software Delivery Management Report, Accelerated Strategies Group

Hey, everyone, this is Alan Shimel. And you're listening to another DevOps chat, I have a really great chat lined up for us today because I'm joined by my partner, Mitchell Ashley, founder, CEO of Accelerated Strategies Group. Mitchell, welcome to another DevOps chat.

Well, very nice to be here. It's great to be on this side of the microphone for a change. It is kind of.

I mean, Mitchell, before we jump in to our report out of Accelerated Strategies Group, we want to talk about just a little history for our audience. Mitchell and I have been doing a podcast together now for 15 years, at least 2004 or 2005, something like that. We're still secure after all these years.

I was waiting for this as Alan Shimel. This is Mitch Ashley. Remember those days, right?

You know what's out there. It's good to have you on with me. Mitchell, we know, as you said, you go often on this side.

You and I kind of split up our hosting duties for DevOps chat. But we're here today because Accelerated Strategies Group just dropped your report on the state of software delivery management. SDM read it.

And the report was commissioned by our friends at CloudBees. But it really is the independent analysis and research of you. Sanjeev Sharma, principal analyst, Accelerates Strategies Group and the rest of the Accelerated Strategies team.

So, you know, we we've done a little video on this, Mitchell, but I'm going to assume our audience listening here on DevOps chat maybe didn't see the video. OK, we start off. When we talk about SDM, what are we talking about here?

You know, we're used to we've got all kinds of names for methodologies, software development, lifecycle management. You know what? What I think it's really about software delivery.

Management is about the whole delivery, the end to end process of how do you manage the software process from - here's money we're going to invest in something that we think is going to be created through software. How do you know in in through the whole machinations that goes through did actually create the software that, you know, where you are and what you think you're going to be getting. And then when it's all done, how do you know that you got what you thought you paid for?

And just think about it is sort of the business view into managing the software process. T. and product teams, but also the executives, senior senior leaders can find out what the heck is going on and how.

Well, it's really about how well do we develop software and how well our ability to manage it. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, we we had this discussion earlier with Sanjeev was, well, correct.

And, you know, in my mind, it's about how do we manage the factory rather than how do we work on the assembly line? A lot of software today, especially in the DevOps world, is about how do we work on the assembly line. And that's a noble.

Worthy, we, you know, thing to do is important. Right. At software delivery.

Pipeline, that factory, no assembly line. As we move so far, left or right. But, you know, someone needs to be managing the controls, right?

And are we doing. Are we doing it just in time or are we using, you know, lean? And if so, how?

You know, even lean. You always need to be turning the dial and checking things out. I do like to talk a little bit.

Mitchell will let me let's first start with this. Sure. What's the Monch Artic soil orated strategy is information wants to be free.

And in that vein, this report is free and open to anyone. Anyone would like to download it. Right.

That's our that's our belief. I mean, that's really what we founded. And you were part of founding Accelerated Strategies Group two is let's do something disruptive in the analysts industry.

You and I have paid an awful lot of money to analysts for sometimes questionable. What are we getting for it? And and but we have to do it right.

And we paid for access to we pay for access, even though that's know everyone sells the technology. But it is I mean, let's be honest about it. I think it is anyway with accelerating.

We said, look, we're not going to pay, you know, every time you touch an ounce. And she had to pay him every time you said something to him, you're like dropping another coin. And let's do this the right way.

Let's do this. When you're working with us, engaging us to do something for you, you know, do some research. Assess the market.

Advise you. Do a strategic project work. Do some competitive analysis.

All of those things where research report. That's when we'll make our money. You're welcome to distribute that as freely as you like.

We're not going to hold you behind a paywall and subscription fees and licensing. And you know what? Your customers gave it all.

Give us all that information. Why don't we give it back to in some meaningful way instead of making them pay for it? No.

Mitchell, I think back to the days where we would pay, you know, certain large analysts company to send an analyst out to spend the day with us. And we take them up at the airport and get Abraxas the lunch and, you know, keep. Why did Dinham one day while trying get him to understand our point of view and when a job back off at the airport.

I'll be honest with you, I thought the little dirty. Well I kind of felt like well why do I feel like we know more about this space. There was no doubt that I felt like I knew more of that space.

But you know what? Look, everybody needs to make a living. And these are the oldest professions in the world.

But I really felt like I didn't like paying for it. I mean, and there was definitely some of that involved. But enough about the analyst guy, if you like, three podcast episodes.

One week we can go off on that. What I wanted to talk about, though, Mitchell, is would you share with our audience a little bit of insight? How was the research done here?

The analysis? I know Sanjeev principal, Sanjeev Sharma, principal analyst, was lead author on this report. But give us an idea of the ASG methodology, if you will.

Well, really, in research has to start out with some hypotheses. What do we believe about the market? Or what do you think we believe about the market?

And really the hypothesis here was around what's the maturity level of our ability to manage the entire software delivery process? T.. So where we started with that, we have a target audience or we're trying to talk with both individual contributors.

So leaders in the software development part of this, but also executives, product people, CEOs. So we really, really tried to cast a big enough net, but not so broad that it got all got watered down. You couldn't tell who said what.

We really spent some time focusing on who we wanted to talk to. And it wasn't a short survey, but it wasn't a long one. Really some insightful questions around, you know, how you know what your backlog looks like and what it costs you to delay a release or to trade something off one feature for another.

You really know when you're gonna get the release or the functionality that you're paying for. So you can, you know, move the business forward based on those plans or are you kind of shooting in the dark and you're just hoping that it comes out sometime in the next quarter and we're good and then we'll kind of get everything running from there. So if we did a survey, but we did a lot of kind of research going into it, talking to different people.

In those roles before we ever built the questionnaire. So it's not just a research firm that says, OK, what do you want us to ask? This bill's goal, just survey Sanjeev and the other analysts with Accelerated Strategies Group are all practitioners.

They've done this. They've worked in this field. They've led software teams, projects, companies.

They have consulted with, you know, big enterprises, small, small startups, medium sized companies. So all that to say, it was really our best attempt. Let's get the best information we can when we go out and ask people for where they think they are, when their maturity curve and where they really see the challenges.

And we've got some fantastic results. It was super, super and insightful and kind of exciting to see what things we thought were true and what maybe some things were. That's a bit of a surprise.

Yeah. OK. I guess you kind of open that up.

Well, no, I think you got start somewhere. Let's start with the surprises, you know. So one of the one of the biggest things that everyone I would say everyone, one of the biggest outcomes of this research was around everyone's ability to understand the value they're going to get from their investment.

Right. T. organization, product team, whatever.

And what am I really going to get at the end? So it's very clear. It's very unclear to the people funding the work that they're they essentially understand what they're going to get.

It just can't get to that information or get us get a straight answer or connect well enough into it to really understand it. Which kind of goes to the second key finding was the communications around the whole software creation process is broken. It may work within a development team that's really functioning tightly together, an agile team with a product leader that they're working with day to day.

But outside of that, both kind of horizontal horizontally, but also vertically in the organization, the perception at senior leader level versus the individual and the team levels that are building software can be much, much different. So can you imagine making. Well, we've done this right now and making multi-million maybe.

Much, much, much larger decisions were based on what you think is going on. And that's not really true. So that's a huge issue for if we if we really believe in software is eating the world all businesses or software companies, you've got to fix that.

That's got to be taken care of. And then the third area is. Basically all the way through the delivery pipeline and understanding the value flow, where are you creating value and where are you actually expending energy and not getting value, maybe getting the wrong output of the software process?

Because what an example I like to use is softer scenes like to measure how many releases we get out per day sometimes for our part. I mean, that's a great thing. It sounds like a really awesome thing to accomplish.

But if it's the wrong thing, wrong software doesn't matter for releasing a million times an hour. I'll take one release a month if it's the right thing, instead of a million releases every day and all of them aren't hitting the market. It's an extreme, but that's that's really what it is, is understanding through that hole.

And again, we're talking about not one pipeline of work, one one value stream of or it's across multiple because almost every app touches all kinds of systems. Especially in a large enterprise mainframe stuff in the cloud stuff that's maybe kind of gold client server, but still around whatever it might be. So those those are the three key areas that we identified that if you can assess where you are and how well you do that, part of the software development, that will make the biggest difference in sort of upping your game and and your ability to deliver software.

Agreed. Agreed. You know, I guess I'm not surprised, but I am surprised that, you know, the the first thing I learned about DevOps was it's about breaking down silos and bringing Dev and Ops together.

We can break those silos, kind of like the Macintosh 1984 commercial and the hammer. And, you know, again, I'm reminded of the WHO song, Why We Won't Get Fooled Again. The new boss, same as the old boss.

And it seems as hard as you try to break down silos we keep helpless. I was meant to create more silence. Is that just the nature of the beast here?

You know, I think I think either it's human nature or organizational dynamics. There's there's certainly something to it. And I just think on a personal level, when you get pride and ego and all those kind of things, you know, I guess what people hoard information or they don't report accurate information for fear of reprisal or maybe looking bad or whatever you have to get.

I think if you if you become tried to become a data driven organization, that helps because now you can argue with the data. Maybe you can argue with what the data's saying, but but you've got something to go to instead of we're all just going to go along kind of happy and assuming it's working well because we don't know any better. But the silo thing is actually a real issue.

I mean, there definitely were a section of the respondents who said they had seen improvements in silos, but it's still very much a huge issue, especially across vertical parts of the organization. So, you know, I don't know that there's any magic bullet to it, but it certainly says if we've been doing agile for 15, 20 years, DevOps for seven or eight years, what it is, it's not solving the whole problem. It's part of it.

It's helping. But there's got to be more. And I, I tend to think it's that layer between the technical organizations and the business organization.

There is so much fidelity of information that's lost in translation. Either the technical people or this is just my opinion now not and research out of the study. But there's so much work into.

Well, let's go educate them about what we know. Well, the business people on, you know, all the details, what pyrotechnical people know. In fact, if we can learn some business terms and try to go Saddam the CFO and get our model straight, we'll go forward, go present to the chief product officer or whatever.

That's just going to help us all. And I think things like that are what's going to help move the needle on some of these communications. But that's only part of.

Yeah. You know what? I also think there's a fair amount and maybe this is human nature of us in that.

We met the enemy and his eyes. I think, you know, when you look at the underpinning cultural. Kind of foundations of DevOps.

It was very much about breaking down us and that they're all us. We're Orlean's and we're all, you know, with one common goal, which is to make the business better, to better serve our customers. And sometimes in that pursuit.

Because as soon as you have us in that right, it goes back to Cain and Abel. As soon as you have us in them, you get those factions. You get those.

You get the silos. And, you know, I think that is. I don't know if it SDM.

I mean, certainly this report shows the. The silos are still there and maybe they're different silos, but silos. And I don't know if that's part of the SDM mission is to continue breaking those down.

Or maybe it's just the highlight where we see ourselves in that and do that. I think it is from a visibility standpoint culturally, that's you know, I always say to the culture word because that's sort of a catchall for we can't do anything right. Ultimately, I hate to be overly simplistic about it, but doesn't it always seem the best?

Most successful organizations have fantastic leadership. None of them none of them that do really well have crappy leadership. I can tell you that all political army.

Well, no, I wasn't going to watch that. No, I wasn't going there. It does.

It it does. Those games start at the top and they start at the bottom two and the when they start at the bottom. And I don't mean to kind of play the whole level game, but they only you get the environment you're willing to accept from.

You know what, Andrew Clay Shafer said that years ago, the DevOps you get is the DevOps you deserve. And. Still true today.

Anyway, Mitchell, we're running out of time on this one, but for people who want to grab the report, it's available on the Accelerated Strategies website. com. It is.

Thank you very much. Yeah, it's also available via a cloudbees. I'm not sure if CloudBees it's behind a reg wall or not.

I don't know. I think to get the full report. Yeah.

They're, they're asking for registrations. But you know, it's, it's that sort of everybody and we don't do that on the accelerated side. But yeah, that's pretty common thing.

Doesn't make, I said it doesn't make them a bad person. No, no, no, no. That's what they're going to do with that.

That matters. And they seem to be pretty good folks. I hear you.

Mitchell, congratulations to you and Sanjeev on this. I know we have another report maybe dropping sometime this week or early next week. I don't want another chat and talk about that one as well.

We will. This will be in the security genre so you can vote. Yes.

Yeah. I'm looking forward to that one. All righty.

All right. Mitchell Ashley, founder, CEO of Accelerated Strategies Group. My guest today on DevOps chat.

Hey, Mitchell. Good luck. And we'll speak to you soon.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you. All right.

There's Alan Schimel. And you just listen to another DevOps chat.