Using Lean Thinking to identify and address Delivery Pipeline bottlenecks discusses applying Lean principles to accelerate feedback and improve time to value across the development, testing, and production stages. It identifies common bottlenecks like deploying infrastructure and provides examples of how adopting DevOps practices like continuous delivery can help optimize pipelines and flow of work. The document advocates mapping bottlenecks and implementing solutions like capturing infrastructure as code to enable faster, more reliable application deployments.

1. Using Lean Thinking to identify and
address Delivery Pipeline bottlenecks
Sanjeev Sharma
IBM WW Lead, DevOps Technical Sales
@sd_architect
© 2013 IBM Corporation

2. Inefficient software delivery impacts the entire
business
OPERATIONS
Rapid app releases impact system stability and
compliance
Systems of Interaction
Systems of Record
Systems of Engagement
Continuous
client experience
Partner value
chain
Cloud-based
Services
>45%
of customers
experience
production delays
>50%
of outsourced
projects fail to meet
objectives
>70%
of budgets devoted to
maintenance and
operations
4-6 weeks
to deliver even minor
application changes to
customers
DEVELOPMENT/TEST
Speed mismatch between faster moving front office and slower
moving back office systems, delaying time to obtain feedback
SUPPLIERS
Delivery in the context of agile
LINE-OF-BUSINESS
Takes too long to introduce or make changes to
mobile apps and services
CRM HR
DB ERP

3. 3
Customers now control the pace of technology adoption
cycles
Your company:
Geoffrey Moore “Crossing the Chasm” circa 1991
Your customer:
Geoffrey Moore “Crossing the Chasm” in 2014
2 – 3 years
4 – 6 months

4. 6-12 Month Delivery Cycles Are Still the Norm
Delivery cycle profile across
600 business enterprises
Days
<10%
Quarters
35%
Months
40%
Weeks
15%
Feedback
cycles
Source--The New Software Imperative: Fast Delivery With Quality: 8 DevOps Practices Hold The Key To Success
A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By IBM, August 2014

5. Moving from Months to Weeks is a challenge
TradiAonal"pracAces"
hit"a"barrier"to"faster"
delivery"
Water,SCRUM,fall"
Waterfall"
12+"months" 6,11"
months"
3,5"
months"
1,2"
months"
DevOps"pracAces"and"
tooling"are"essenAal"
to"fast"delivery"with"
low"failure"risk"
1,3"
weeks" Days"
"""Degree"of"Risk"_"
""Delivery"Cycle"Times_"
© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited 11"

6. DevOps approach: Apply Lean principles accelerate feedback and
improve time to value
Line-of-business
Customer
1
3
2
1. Get ideas into production fast
2. Get people to use it
3. Get feedback
Lean
Transformation
Non-Value-added waste
Value-added production work
http://ibm.co/devopsfordummies

7. DevOps == Continuous Improvement"
Leverage feedback across the Delivery Pipeline to
Continuously Improve:
I. Application Delivered
II. Environment Deployed
III. Application and Environment Delivery Process

8. IBM DevOps Adoption Model
Practices, tools and services to plan and execute a staged adoption of
DevOps to improve business outcomes
Efficiency
Productive Waste
Feedback
Cycles
Steer Product-based
Agile
Automated
Collaborative
Optimizing
More
Predictable
More
Transparent
More
Continuous
Process-based
Process-heavy
Manual
Silo-ed
Develop/Test
Deploy
Operate
Inefficient Leaner Leaner and Smarter

9. 9
The Big Sources of Wasted Efforts: Find the Hidden Factory
Non-Value-added waste
Value-added production work
Type of Waste Create Feature Deliver Feature
Unnecessary
Overhead
Communicating ideas/knowledge Communicating between development
and operations
Unnecessary
Re-work
Tasks assigned back to developers
from testing and usage
Tasks assigned back to developers from
production rollbacks
Over-production
Unnecessary functionality produced Unnecessary hardware, data center,
personnel
Lean
Transformation

10. What is Overhead? vs What is Productive?
Fat efforts to minimize
Waiting
Training
Reporting
Traceability
Late rework
Duplicate efforts
Metrics collection
Regression testing
Change propagation
Document generation
Meetings/Checkpoints
System administration
Resource accounting
Human inspections
Streamline or automate
More valuable efforts to improve
Scoping
Learning
Feedback
Refactoring
Designing
Teaming
Coding
Testing
Planning
Engineering
Empowering
Prediction
Deciding
Steering
Facilitate or smarten

11. Priorities of Indian Global System Integrators
Fat efforts to minimize
Late rework
Waiting
Regression testing
Duplicate efforts
Reporting
Document generation
Training
Metrics collection
Change propagation
Traceability
Human inspections
Meetings/Checkpoints
System administration
Resource accounting
Streamline or automate
More Valuable efforts to improve
Scoping
Designing
Planning
Testing
Reusing
Deciding
Steering
Feedback
Coding
Prediction
Engineering
Learning
Teaming
Refactoring
Facilitate or smarten

12. Eight DevOps Macro Practices
1. Deliver in small increments of functionality.
2. Form dedicated, cross-functional teams.
3. Use loose coupling between applications.
4. Automate environment provisioning.
5. Continuously integrate code.
6. Continuously test.
7. Continuously fund.
8. Provide real-time transparency.
Source--The New Software Imperative: Fast Delivery With Quality: 8 DevOps Practices Hold The Key To Success
A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By IBM, August 2014

13. Optimize pipeline with an even flow end to end"
§ Throughput of each process must be the equal in order to avoid backlogs.
§ When preceding process is upgraded to a higher throughput, subsequent
processes must be upgraded to the same higher throughput in order to maintain
balance.

14. Steer the Product Pipelines
Build
Value accrues as product artifacts evolve, NOT by effort
expended or by progress in supporting artifacts
IBM Confidential
Ideas
Tradeoffs
Delivered
Simple
Instrumenta5on:
Time:
Volume:
Cycle
'me
Batch
size
Change
speed
Queue
size
Queue
'me
Throughput
• Minimize
wai5ng
in
backlog
queues
• Op5mize
work
in
progress
• Adjust
capacity
and
flow
Validate
Proposed
Understood
Verified
Certified

15. DevOps Adoption: Address bottlenecks in the Delivery
Pipeline
Develop
/ Test
Steer Deploy Operate
Collaborative Development
Continuous Testing
Continuous Release and Deployment
Business
Owner
Service
Developer/Tester
Service
Operations
Target
Customer
Idea Market
DevOps
Continuous
Business Planning
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous feedback and Optimization
Lean and Agile principles
Identify Delivery
Pipeline
Bottlenecks

16. Map your Bottlenecks
Line of Business Customers
PMO
Requirements/
Analyst
Idea/Feature/Bug Fix/
Enhancement
Production
Release Management
Deployment Engineer
Development Build QA SIT UAT Prod
Developer
Build
Engineer
QA Team Integration Tester User/Tester Operations
Artifact Repository
Code Repository
Deploy
Get Feedback
Infrastructure as Code/
Cloud Patterns
Feedback
Customer or
Customer Surrogate
Metrics - Reporting/Dashboarding
Tasks
Artifacts

17. Deploying Infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck for
the Delivery Pipeline "
§ The adoption of DevOps ==
increased velocity of application
delivery
§ Puts pressure on the
infrastructure to respond more
quickly
§ Software Defined Environments
enable you to capture
infrastructure as a software
artifact
Application !
Changes!
Infrastructure!
Changes!

18. Continuous Delivery to Cloud
The freedom to provision a version of a full stack or incrementally deploy an
application version into an already provisioned environment
Deployment Automation
Blueprint
Application Resource
Template
Environments | Processes | Configurations
Utilize Cloud
Environment
pattern
Deploy app
Create env
from pattern
DDEDEDVEVE V V QA PROD
Cloud Platform
§ Capture cloud pattern to be used for creating an Environment
§ Incremental deployment of application builds to cloud environments
§ Map the application to multiple cloud patterns

19. Implementing ‘Full Stack’ Continuous Delivery: IBM
UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns"
Infrastructure Specialists
develop and update
reusable building blocks for
application environment
patterns 1
Components
Architects and Integrators design
and update application environment
patterns from building blocks targeting
cloud platform
2
Application Pattern
Building
Blocks
3
Release Engineers
leverages the application
environment patter to
create and manage a multi-stage
continuous delivery
pipeline
Application Developers and Testers 4
can test the application changes for in
a production-like environment
Deploy Templates Design Templates
vSys, vApp
Application
Middleware Config
Middleware
OS Config
Hardware

20. 20
Building a DevOps Culture
• Everyone is responsible for Delivery
• Common measures of Success
• Right People are needed
Product
Owner
Team
Member
Team Lead
Team
Member
Team
Member
External
System Team
Senior
Executives
Users
Domain
Experts
Auditors
Gold Owner
Support Staff
Operations
Staff
Above all - it’s all about the People/Culture

21. People
21

22. Fidelity Worldwide Investments
Achieves predictable release schedules and simplifies regulatory
compliance
Achieved
cost avoidance of more than USD2.3
million per year
Gained
more predictable release
schedules for stakeholders
Improved
the ability to demonstrate
compliance with regulations
Solution components
Software
§ IBM® UrbanCode™ Deploy
222 2
The transformation: As it prepared to launch a critical new application,
Fidelity Worldwide Investment wanted to replace its manual release
processes with an automated release solution.
The solution helped reduce the time required for software releases
by 99 percent, from 2 - 3 days to just 1 - 2 hours. The company also
achieved cost avoidance of more than USD2.3 million per year.
“Applications that took days to release now take just
an hour.”
— Tony Green, Technology, Architecture and Engineering,
Fidelity Worldwide Investment
IBM Software – Case Study - Financial Services
Enterprise
systems

23. Sandhata accelerates software delivery and improves
competitiveness with continuous testing
Adoption path: Develop/Test
100% increase in team productivity
Doubled the division’s project delivery
capacity from 40 to
80 projects
88% reduction in production
incidents
Identified and resolved defects
earlier in the release cycle
Tens of millions in new revenue
generated
Increased agility to seize new
market opportunities
23
Continuous
Testing
“IBM’s service virtualization and test automation
solutions enabled our banking client to embrace
an agile, DevOps approach and perform
integration testing continuously throughout the
development process. They recouped their IBM
investment in less than three months.”
— Gary Thornhill,
Delivery Director Sandhata Technologies Ltd

24. DevOps approach speeds IBM Watson solutions to
market
Adoption path: Develop/Test
Reduced delivery cycles
from nine weeks to three weeks
Compact releases
better matched to customer
expectations
Zero maintenance window
downtime through continuous
availability
24
Collaborative
Development
“DevOps helps us achieve continuous delivery and
deliver continuous value.”
— Carl Kraenzel, Director of the Watson
Managed services group, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM

25. How IBM Rational Cloud Hosted Products have improved!
Lifecycle Measurements 2008 2010 2012 – 2014 Total
Improvement
Project Initiation 30 days 10 days 2 days 28 days
Groomed Backlog 90 days 45 days On-going 89 days
Overall Time To Development 120 days 55 days 3 days 117 days
Composite Build Time 36 hours 12 hours 5 hours 700 %
BVT Availability N / A 18 hours < 1hour 17 hours
Iteration Test Time 5 days 2 days 14 hours 4 days
Total Deployment Time 2 days 8 hours 4 hours -> 20
minutes
2 days
Overall Time To Production 9 days 3 days 2 days 7 days
Time Between Releases 12 Months 12 Months 3 Months 9 Months
Innovation / Maintenance 58% / 42% 64% / 36% 78% / 22% +20% / -20%
Double-digit revenue growth, increased client adoption, improved client satisfaction
25