[OA.LS.3] Drive continued improvement through business reviews
Category: FOUNDATIONAL
While adopting DevOps, many small teams begin to form which own and operate their own value stream of the business. Teams must verify that their operations remain agile, efficient, and aligned with overarching business objectives. Leaders must be able to report on DevOps progress and outcomes. However, having many distributed teams and systems makes it more difficult for leaders to maintain full visibility across all of the value streams. It's possible to retain this visibility across a decentralized operating model by creating structured, data-driven mechanisms, such as conducting regular business review meetings and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). The mechanisms help leaders pinpoint areas of inefficiencies, uncover opportunities to innovate, and create a culture of continual feedback, measurement, and refinement.
Begin by developing a set of KPIs that align with desired business outcomes and simultaneously demonstrates the impact of DevOps adoption on achieving them. KPIs are quantifiable metrics that are used to measure the performance of an organization or project as it progresses towards a goal. Tracking KPIs verifies that the goal is moving in the right direction and achieving desired outcomes. KPIs should be continually improved and refined over time to keep them aligned with business objectives as the organization adopts DevOps and business needs change.
Schedule frequent business review meetings to review KPIs, bringing together both technical and business stakeholders on a regular cadence. Each team should continually capture both technical and business related KPIs and make them presentable for regular business reviews. Regularly reviewing the KPIs informs leaders of the health and direction of the team's value stream. Fluctuations in the KPIs reflect the outcome of team efforts and can be a predictor of future outcomes.
Within Amazon, teams and leaders meet regularly during weekly business reviews (WBRs)
to assess the validity and quality of KPIs against organizational goals. For a data-driven,
systematic approach to this process, we follow the DMAIC
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