Where are you on the DevOps Maturity Model Curve ?

Nowadays all the organisation are in the middle of adopting a DevOps transformation. May be they struggle to get there. Important questions for any organisation is where are they in their journey. Its not easy to find answers that apply to all organisations since a DevOps transformation affects all of the departments and all the organisations are different. So can a framework help here? At which maturity level are you? 

Consider a brand new startup company that immersed in cloud-native without any legacy, delivering reliable software from source code to production quickly and without a lot of errors, security issues and so on, then that organization is in good shape. Even better if organization already collect continuous feedback to improve the next iteration.  This proves that you have automated a lot of steps from the software development lifecycle. Thigs looks promising when you are at this maturity level.

But what about large organization with legacy code, long-winded approval processes, siloed teams and lot of manual handovers? Companies who react ‘’ad-hoc” to external changes and disruptions of their production environments. Imagine there are lots of lots of developers teams without experience with CI/CD, DevOps and production monitoring. Then you definitely benefit from using DevOps maturity model.

So what is DevOps Maturity Model?

A DevOps maturity model is a conceptual model in the form of a matrix of maturity levels at one side and areas ( with subtopics) at the other side. Organisations use these models to determine the current ( and desired) level of DevOps related topics.

DevOps itself is not just about having a continuous integration / continuous delivery pipeline in place for your application and / or infrastructure. Its much broader and doesn't only focus on the technical aspects. Organisation adopting DevOps typically struggle with questions like -

1) How to automate right things to remove manual process steps. 

2) How to properly perform release management.

3) How to get teams and managers to adopt a product-centered mindset.

4) How to establish and improve collaboration between teams.

5) How to bring continuous integration / continuous delivery into reality.

The DevOps maturity model acts as a 'mental guide' to determine the level of these topics and it helps you layout a path to advance from one level to the next one.

There are four main area, almost every DevOps maturity model is based on specific area of interest. These areas - Technology, Process, People and Culture - reflect the various aspects of DevOps in an organisation.

Let's move on to see the different levels at which organisation can be in their journey.