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Digital ProductivityUsing a DevOps approach to empower teams and scale productivity

The 6point6 DevOps Operating Model (DOOM) is a movement towards more operations ownership, empowering your teams to scale digital productivity.

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Whilst this sounds straight forward in principle, the reality is that many businesses enjoy small pockets of DevOps success where practices work well within a few development teams, but there tends to be little consistency across the board.

Rather than driving best practice and building a culture of DevOps working at scale, we see independent DevOps cottage industries, each with varying degrees of success.

Failing to deploy a DevOps culture successfully within your organisation will affect more than your ability to deliver improved productivity.

It can pose a risk to the viability of the very projects, products and services that the methodology is designed to help.

Not only this, operational and security governance become significantly weakened by a lack of consistency across teams, where ideas are left unable to flow.

We are living in an era of digital Darwinism where technology and society are evolving faster than ever - at times, faster than businesses can adapt. To allow your business to cope with such rapid, sustained change, we believe there needs to be a cultural and operational shift in the delivery of IT, towards a DevOps Operating Model (DOOM).

The 6point6 DevOps Operating Model (DOOM) is our method for scaling your digital productivity. And it goes beyond simply installing DevOps capabilities within your team.

We help you to scale those capabilities across all development and operations teams within your organisation, instilling a culture of best practice and consistency of approach, whilst empowering teams to innovate and deliver value against your overall business objectives.

https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/04/digital-darwinism-disruptive-technology-changing-business-good/

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How we solve the problem

The first step in helping you to achieve this is to understand your business process and technical landscape.

The importance of culture

This helps us to establish where DevOps can add the most value within your organisation.

As part of this, we’ll describe the current operational and development landscape and identify where gaps in your capabilities exist.

This will lead us to create a transformation strategy from which we can create and deliver a bespoke, scaled DevOps solution to plug the gaps.

To maintain your DevOps momentum, we can also work with you to instill the wider culture of DevOps, allowing your development teams to push efficiencies through the development life cycle and, ultimately, to achieve operating at scale.

Core to this is the sharing of best practice, methods and tooling.

We will work with your team to find areas of consistency in tooling, process and methods, whilst empowering your people to work collaboratively in a high-trust environment.

DevOps execution Scaled DevOps Accelerator (Typhon)

DevOps Strategy

DevOps performance assessment

DevOps Culture

Describe

Create

DeliverOperate

Understand

DevOps“On Point”

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What we offer

This is where we get an accurate understanding of the current performance of your teams and their software delivery lifecycle.

Working onsite with you, we uncover practical improvements that can be made across your development and operational business.

Our assessment looks at all areas of DevOps from automation, infrastructure and testing to CI/CD and development process.

As part of this, we will explore:

• Version Control

• Deployment Automation

• Test Automation

• Continuous Integration

• Culture

• Learning

• Monitoring

• Visualisations

At the end of this process, you will be given a report with recommendations and priorities to action.

It will highlight your current capabilities and areas of strength, with constructive feedback on aspects which we believe can be improved.

DevOps Performance Assessment (2-4 weeks)

DevOps Strategy (4-6 weeks)

We often see the desire to empower development teams to take greater operational ownership of the products they build and support.

However, the hardest part of successfully implementing this sort of DevOps culture at scale, is acquiring the additional skills necessary within your development and product teams.

Following on from the performance assessment, our strategy sets out an actionable DevOps roadmap.

This details how you can add DevOps capability to your teams using the shared tooling they have helped to shape and grow, whilst achieving better performance and quick turnover of features to meet the evolving needs of your business.

As part of this, you will be provided with a documented end-state target, with key milestones on how rapidly this can be achieved.

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DevOps Execution (3 months +/-)

DevOps Execution is often the first step to embedding your DevOps capabilities. This is where we focus on the implementation of best practice within your teams.

We do this by providing you with the practical tools necessary to improve one or more aspect of your development lifecycle.

As part of this, a 6point6 DevOps delivery team with a range of development and operations skills will work with you to implement several solutions.

These may include some of the following key areas:

• Automation - CI/CD and tooling

• Observability - Three pillars of Observability: Logging, metrics and instrumentation

• Visualisation - Dashboarding and knowledge transfer

• Infrastructure - Configuration management, immutable infrastructure

• Security - DevSecOps, implementing Security into the end-to-end development

• Containers/Serverless - Moving to, and managing containers/serverless

• Cloud - Migrating to the Cloud and Cloud optimisation

• Release Orchestration - Deploying code and creating successful releases

• Collaboration - Working with multiple and remote teams

• AIOps - Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations

• Database Automation - Managing modern database infrastructure

• Testing - Improving test coverage and automation of the development process

• DataOps - Bringing DevOps to analytic and data teams

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Being able to deliver a minimal viable product (MVP) rapidly to end users is a key attribute of any successful organisation.

However, infrastructure lead times on new projects can sometimes mean it can be weeks before developers are able to write their first line of code.

Our Scaled DevOps Accelerator (Typhon) is a DevOps toolchain production line which allows work to start on an MVP rapidly, without compromising security, quality or best practice of the delivery pipeline.

6point6 Typhon - Scaled DevOps Accelerator

Adding value

To maintain your competitive edge, we will empower you by helping you stay informed not just about the current landscape, but also about what is on the horizon.

Our DevOps On Point team regularly monitors the world of DevOps, looking to determine where the focus will be next, what technologies are coming through, and how you can best leverage them to your advantage.

When done well, a successful DOOM will create a DevOps sprint team capable of delivering greater operations ownership and development productivity, whilst instilling a culture of best practice within your business which will ensure greater efficiency at scale.

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How we have done this in the past

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As part of their W2020 World Service expansion project, the BBC aimed to improve their global reach to 500 million.

BBC News

With this in mind, and against a backdrop of growing competition and budget cuts, the BBC sought a move to the cloud.

Converting this vast and complex site with complex legacy applications required a completely new approach to its structure and processes.

To do this we created a unique Scaled DevOps Accelerator to standardise and automate application deployments.

We mobilised a team of DevOps specialists to establish a new way of working, eliminating manual configuration within the CI pipeline from test to live.

After migrating 44 applications/pipelines across 8 workstreams, the 6point6 approach was adopted by BBC Central IT, to continue the programme of change across the remaining 160.

As a result of our work, we built development speed by 90% and reduced cloud costs by 26%.

We achieved this by:

• Promoting shared methods, a blameless culture and open source tooling across 12 BBC-News agile development teams

• Building a CI/CD platform to provide a consistent approach to CI/CD pipeline management

• Upgrading CloudFormation infrastructure code enabling scheduled deployments, auto-scaling of environments and rapid deployment roll back

• Creating project and environment generators able to create infrastructure, pipelines and application framework for specific development technologies

• Improving testing throughout the pipeline from integration through to performance

• Reducing development team pipeline management by modularising features such as reporting, automated testing, blue/green zero downtime and multi-region deployments

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No matter under what definition you view DevOps, you will always see automation as a key component - from CI/CD to the deployment of Infrastructure and networking.

Our ThoughtsAutomation

Automation and the elimination of manual steps will greatly improve the speed, reliability and consistency of operation and development process.

DevOps automation is a process of continuous monitoring and improvement. When a new bottleneck is found it needs to be evaluated to determine how best it should be eliminated or mitigated.

Often a DevOps toolchain is able to meet your automation needs with standard configuration and minimal scripting, but sometime bespoke tooling is needed to fully realise and optimise automation requirements.

This bespoke tooling can have the additional benefit of adding consistent approaches across multiple teams. A consistent approach enables best practice, security, and governance to be embedded across teams.

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About 6point6

Integrating digital technology into your business can result in fundamental changes to how you operate and deliver value to your customers. To go digital is to reinvent yourself to the core, opening yourself and your clients to a world of possibilities.

6point6 is a technology consultancy. We bring a wealth of hands-on experience to help businesses achieve more with digital.

Using cutting edge technology and agile delivery methods, we help you reinvent, transform and secure a brighter digital future.

Visit us at 6point6.co.uk Twitter: @6point6ltd LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/6point6

SIX.SIX.091

Get in touchMARK DEBNEY

Director, DevOpsmark.debney@6point6.co.uk