For a long time now, enterprises have been looking at digital, DevOps, and agile transformations as a silver bullet that can solve all their problems. To date, there has been a heavy focus on tooling and rigid processes. Not surprisingly, enterprises have been falling short of their intended goals, achieving minimal success.
At Liatrio, we believe that enterprise transformation needs to involve Enterprise Delivery Acceleration by accelerating delivery of business value to customers. DevOps is about more than tooling and processes. It’s also about collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
Technology transformation is extremely hard! In 2018 we saw firsthand how enterprises are coming to this realization. It’s through adopting different ways of working that enterprises are achieving true success in their transformations. To get to this kind of outcome, they need consulting firms that act as true partners.
Let me explain what I mean. These days, most enterprises have become completely reliant on consulting firms. The DORA 2018 State of DevOps Report finds that low-performing organizations are 3.9 times more likely to use functional outsourcing. These firms have little incentive to improve their customers’ way of working as doing so results in their customers being more self-reliant and less dependent on them. Every consulting firm calls themselves a partner, but a true partner uplifts their clients. Consultants should light the spark, motivate their clients, and set them on a path toward self-reliant Enterprise Delivery Acceleration. Enterprises can achieve real greatness, but only by improving from within.
Analysis shows that low-performing teams are 3.9 times more likely to use functional outsourcing (overall) than elite performance teams, and 3.2 times more likely to use outsourcing of any of the following functions: application development, IT operations work, or testing and QA. This suggests that outsourcing outsourcing by function is rarely adopted by elite performers. ~ DORA 2018 State of DevOps Report
Why 2019 Is the Year of Enterprise Delivery Acceleration
Liatrio’s learning from 2018 has informed our approach to 2019. We’ve optimized our services around uplifting the culture, practices, and skills of our customers, setting them on a path to self-reliance. Our approach incorporates hands-on immersive learning environments (aka Dojos), cloud-native-inspired environments, and full-stack, product oriented team structures.
Liatrio believes Dojo-style, hands-on immersive learning in a controlled environment allows you to effectively hack the culture and optimize your engineers’ experience and overall learning. This is the most effective way to scale new practices within an organization, build ongoing, organization-wide uplift, and truly transform an organization’s way of working. To achieve this goal, however, you need top-down champions and new leader behaviors that empower the new way of working. The Dojo movement encourages both a top-down and a bottoms-up approach.
Further, while the cloud-native movement has grown in popularity, enterprises are struggling to understand what it means for them. While some enterprises are successfully migrating to the public cloud, many organizations have a long future of data centers and legacy applications ahead of them. In 2019, we expect to see a surge of enterprise solutions that incorporate cloud-native behaviors, architectures, and ways of working (think smaller, decoupled applications; simplified deployment methodologies; private clouds and systems like Kubernetes; and enterprise-grade tools such as OpenShift).
In addition, DevOps has focused on software delivery, infrastructure automation, and improving the interactions and relationships across functions within the IT organization. The end result has allowed enterprises to optimize “how” they deliver technology. However, this isn’t enough! The next stage in this evolution is to optimize “what” you deliver in the first place and “why” you plan to deliver it. This next stage is going to require a shift from a project to product delivery structure (inspired by Project to Product).
Ultimately, enterprises should organize teams around long-term customer value of specific products vs. spinning up teams to support one-off business projects. This idea is often difficult for enterprises to grasp, and it will result in long (and hopefully hard-won) battles. The idea is that product teams can weigh options, customer needs, and delivery optimization strategies in order to build better products more rapidly while also delivering a better customer experience. These teams focus their energy on the activities that are going to provide the most value to their customers, religiously measure those outcomes, and don’t waste time focusing on functionality that doesn't add value.
New Year, New Website, All-New Look and Feel
Liatrio is a collaborative, end-to-end Enterprise Delivery Acceleration consulting firm that helps enterprises transform the way they work. We work as boots-on-the-ground change agents, helping our clients improve their development practices, react more quickly to market shifts, and get better at delivering value from conception to deployment.
We learned a great deal in 2018, and we’re applying that learning in 2019 to help enterprise organizations achieve agility and consistency in their delivery practices and provide greater value to their customers. Our Lean- and DevOps-inspired thinking focuses on delivery of real business value. To that end, we’ve built an all-new website that reflects how and why we’re different.
To be clear, everybody says they’re different. We actually are. Here’s why --
Experience: Our tech veterans have the DevOps experience needed to evolve people, processes, products, culture, and tools. We set enterprises up for success so they can accelerate delivery and become high-performing technology organizations.
Expertise: Enterprise work is at our core. We work with global 500 organizations that have a long history of market dominance. These organizations are attempting to grow their businesses while fending off long-time competitors and new industry players. In order to speed innovation and deliver world-class products more rapidly, they turn to us for guidance and support.
Guidance: We drive change at both the Leadership and Team levels. We guide our customers in making the best possible technology transformation decisions at the organizational level, as well as roll up our sleeves to help them build high-performing delivery teams. The goal is to enable organizations to continue their Enterprise Delivery Acceleration on their own.
Learn Why We’re a Real Enterprise Transformation Partner
We’ve helped many enterprises stand up, execute, and scale their internal Dojos, and we’re helping to instill internal cloud-native approaches in these organizations on a product-by-product basis while also helping them build high-performing teams. We offer delivery, upskilling, and Technology Transformation, which is a combination that’s hard to beat. 2019 is the year of Enterprise Delivery Acceleration, and we’re prepared to help enterprises ignite their journey.
We hope you’ll visit our new site, which reflects our learning and our renewed enterprise focus. We also hope you’ll visit our blog, where you’ll find our opinionated insights on DevOps, Lean Delivery Practices, delivery processes and technologies, and new developments in the industry. Check out these valuable resources and learn why we’re the consulting firm you won’t hate.
