DevOps involves the practice of developing an organization’s mindset and culture towards promoting collaboration between IT operations and developer teams. The main idea is to accelerate the delivery process without spending millions on infrastructure expenses.
Quoting Michael Cotes, “DevOps ROI can’t be measured, but the ROI of the projects you initiate and the products you develop and release after DevOps is instituted can be measured.”
How to quantify the unfathomable?
1. Faster delivery time
DevOps by nature is considered more of an operational process rather than an investment. Even though it’s difficult to promise a true value prediction, DevOps undoubtedly offers speedy and efficient delivery. This indicates increased deployments, reduced time-to-market along with greater chances of revenue generation.
If you’re able to expedite your development pace and add momentum to your release scheme, your net revenue will increase by two-fold. So in this example, by implementing a DevOps framework your profitability rises and ROI is also high. But not all DevOps release’s focus on enhancing revenue generation, some may only involve fixing bugs, acknowledging customer feedback or concentrating on some maintenance updates. We cannot always be sure of financial gain in all cases of DevOps implementation.
However, all these intangible items can be measured, for we have to pay for time and resources lost. Suppose you lose a few hours of downtime, valuable customers, and an employee’s productivity then won’t these impact your revenue figures. You can arrive at sales figures for a particular product either on an hourly or daily basis. You can use these figures to discover the disparity between revenue and original data.
2. Enhanced Quality Assurance
DevOps contributes significantly towards software quality assurance by fostering a seamless relationship between operations and development teams. In a DevOps environment, there is more emphasis on building customer satisfaction and meeting user expectations in a short span of time. It does not rely on traditional measuring standards for software quality. Also, there is increased realtime data available either from users or tools, which helps in maintaining quality.
3. Improved Development Team Productivity
Another way of calculating DevOps ROI is by evaluating a team’s overall productivity based on estimating idle time and means to avoid it. It is required that an organization’s strategic objectives must be connected with the tasks of different teams to successfully pave the path towards DevOps transformation.
A senior director of operations & support rightly said, “Attempting to put a monetary value on deployments per day does not give an organization an accurate gauge of success. It’s not the value of deployments per day; it’s the value of efficiency in your deployment process, which could potentially result in more deployments per day and a reduction in the cost of deployment.”
4. Determining Business Efficiency
Those organizations which have a top-performing DevOps team are likely to perform better than other businesses in terms of market share, profitability, as well as other financial objectives. IT performance metrics is a key measurement for determining a company’s efficiency. It is divided into 3 factors – frequency of deployment, deployment lead time, and restoration meantime.
As per Forsgren’s research, a business can fall under any of the following three categories based on IT performance parameters:
High IT performers – These companies have a high frequency of deployment, quick lead times, and swift restoration meantime.
Medium IT performers. These companies have a medium frequency of deployment, medium deployment lead times, and medium restoration time.
Low IT performers. These companies are considered the worst performers on all statistical measures.
5. Lowers infrastructure costs
Using DevOps methodology, businesses can spend on their infrastructure requirements depending on workflow demand. The use of containers allows maximum utilization of resources for greater cost-efficiency. You can also use cloud infrastructure for reducing expenses on software and equipment. You can measure the ROI by comparing the services offered and the client base in previous years with the current year.
Though we know that calculating ROI of DevOps is a tough task but any IT team will realize the benefits of speedy delivery, consistent performance, and enhanced quality by implementing a DevOps framework.
Author
DevOps professional with experience in setting up DevOps Roadmap, tools stack, automated CICD pipelines with proven business impact across multiple industries like BFSI, Aviation, Retail & E-commerce.