This Seven Step Digital Transformation Engineering Blueprint is proven engineering approach to systematically transform your people, processes and technologies practices.

1. Seven Step
Digital Transformation
Engineering Blueprint
A proven engineering approach to systematically transform
your people, processes and technologies practices.
Seven Step Transformation Engineering Blueprint Copyright © 2021 by Marc Hornbeek All rights reserved.

2. Digital transformations require skilled leaders and engineers that
have a profound understanding of Continuous Testing, DevOps,
DevSecOps and SRE practices.
Leadership and engineering solutions requires the persistent
application of those skills and practices methodically toward
leading and designing solutions that achieve business and team
goals.
While driven by visionary ideals, engineering requires practical,
disciplined, progressively refined implementations using carefully
chosen dimensions of people, process, and technology solutions.
At any point in the engineering life cycle, the goal is to achieve a
balanced solution while evolving practices towards maturity.
The Seven-Step Transformation Engineering Blueprint described
here prescribes seven steps for achieving and continuously
refining digital transformations methodically, no matter what the
goals or current level of maturity are.

3. Seven-Step Transformation Blueprint
1. Visioning
2. Alignment
3. Assessment
4. Solution
5. Realize
6. Operationalize
7. Expansion
People
Process
Tech

4. Step 1 - Visioning
Top leaders define a strategic vision for the
digital transformation for organization
including a motivating vision statement,
measurable goals, team values, and major
implementation tactics.
Identify senior sponsors that will own the
transformation at the strategic level.
Include key partner organizations that
need to be strategically aligned to the
transformation
Vision Statement
Values
Goals Tactics

5. Step 2 - Alignment
Leaders and key team
members that, are most
important to the
implementation of the
transformation, align specific
measurable goals and tactics
for selected “model”
applications.
Dev
QA
Infra
Ops
Sec

6. Step 3 - Assessment
For the current state of
selected applications,
capabilities are discovered
and assessed, deep-dive
assessments are conducted
for specific topics, and a
current state value-stream
map is created relative to
the organization goals.

7. Step 4 - Solution
An expert team performs
analysis of assessment data
and formulates a future state
value stream roadmap
including Themes, Epics, and
User Stories and obtains
alignment with key
stakeholders.
Actionable Workstreams
Epics, User Stories, Tasks, Dependencies,
Technologies, Balanced workloads

8. Step 5 - Realize
Proof of Concept (POC)
trials are conducted to
validate solution choices.
The solution is validated
with selected applications
and use cases. training is
conducted as
the solution is deployed to
production. Governance
practices for the new
solution are activated.

9. Step 6 - Operationalize
Deployed
improvements are
monitored and
controlled with
metrics.
Retrospectives are
conducted to create
actionable prioritized
lessons learned for
continuous
improvement.

10. Step 7 - Expansion
Once Continuous Flow (The First Way of
DevOps) is realized for a select set of
applications, the organization can safely
expand the solutions to other
applications across the organization.
Further transformation cycles will lead
to realization of Continuous
Feedback (The Second Way of DevOps)
and Continuous Improvement (The
Third Way of DevOps).
Model Application m
Application m + 1
SCALE Adoption
Application m + 2
Application m + n
. . .
POC MVP
2nd
Way
1st
Way
3rd
Way

11. Marc Hornbeek
a.k.a. DevOps_the_Gray esq.
CEO and Principal Consultant
Engineering DevOps Consulting
Author – Engineering DevOps
mhornbeek@engineeringdevops.com
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