Continuous Improvement: KPIs and ROI
Key Points
- Continuous improvement in the DevOps pipeline lets organizations quantify ROI by measuring gains in delivery speed and reductions in production defects.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as deployment frequency, delivery lead‑time, change volume, and mean time to recovery provide the empirical data needed to assess both velocity and quality.
- Effective continuous improvement requires proper instrumentation of the pipeline to collect the metrics that power these KPIs; without it, teams cannot track performance or link investment to outcomes.
- Beyond internal efficiency, continuous improvement also enhances the digital consumer experience by ensuring faster releases that are higher‑quality and better aligned with customer needs.
- When KPI data is missing or investment dollars can’t be tied to measurable results, organizations should rethink their continuous‑improvement strategy, prioritize metric collection, and use the insights to drive further automation, governance tweaks, and skill development.
Sections
Full Transcript
# Continuous Improvement: KPIs and ROI **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iITmoI0s1DQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iITmoI0s1DQ) **Duration:** 00:04:58 ## Summary - Continuous improvement in the DevOps pipeline lets organizations quantify ROI by measuring gains in delivery speed and reductions in production defects. - Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as deployment frequency, delivery lead‑time, change volume, and mean time to recovery provide the empirical data needed to assess both velocity and quality. - Effective continuous improvement requires proper instrumentation of the pipeline to collect the metrics that power these KPIs; without it, teams cannot track performance or link investment to outcomes. - Beyond internal efficiency, continuous improvement also enhances the digital consumer experience by ensuring faster releases that are higher‑quality and better aligned with customer needs. - When KPI data is missing or investment dollars can’t be tied to measurable results, organizations should rethink their continuous‑improvement strategy, prioritize metric collection, and use the insights to drive further automation, governance tweaks, and skill development. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iITmoI0s1DQ&t=0s) **Untitled Section** - ## Full Transcript
hi I'm Andrea Crawford with IBM cloud
we're going to talk about continuous
improvement this is often the last part
of the DevOps wheel but a lot of times
you neglected by clients let's talk
about continuous improvement and what
the benefits are first of all when we're
able to continuously improve the
application delivery pipeline here we're
able to quantify the return on
investment and what I mean by that is
when we invest in automation tools
modifying our governance process and
investing in our people to change the
way that we deliver applications were
able to quantify the velocity and the
quality that we achieve
this is all about understanding with
empirical data how we're getting faster
and how we're improving on the number of
defects that are actually getting
deployed into production but one of the
other benefits of continuous improvement
is all-around customer or consumer
experience so this is the digital
experience and we need to make sure that
we are getting better at not only
becoming faster and delivering with less
defects but are we resonating with our
consumers in terms of the products that
are coming out of this pipeline so with
continuous improvement we really have to
define some key performance indicators
or KPIs to quantify our return on
investment so some of these KPIs might
be things like deployment frequency
deployment frequency is all about
understanding the number of deployments
to production that are measured in days
weeks or months we also have something
called delivery lead time delivery lead
time is all about how long it takes to
get from code all the way through to
deployment and this is typically
measured a number of days there are also
KPIs around change volume which measure
the number of story points that are
actually packaged into releases that
make it to production and we can also
define success around mean time to
recovery and this is all about how long
it takes once a defect is found in
production how long it takes to figure
out that you've got a defect and then
pipe it back in to the software delivery
lifecycle so that a fix can be coded and
so that it can be deployed back into
production so this is mean time to
recovery
so it's deploy to deploy to sum all of
this up use cases are really
lack of kpi's lack of or absence of
instrumentation in this pipeline to
actually gather the empirical data to
measure how fast or how defect-free we
are so no instrumentation and then we
have the lack of being able to trace
investment dollars to the return on
investment if you have issues with any
of these scenarios over here you might
need to improve your continuous
improvement strategy and so as a result
we really need to be able to define KPIs
to measure our success so that we can
quantify a return on investment and in
order to do that we need to be able to
instrument the pipeline to gather
empirical data on how long it takes
applications to get from all of these
phases one to another and then
additionally once we have that empirical
data were able to identify the
bottlenecks where we're slowing down and
that will give us data-driven decision
and information that we can use to
improve on those bottlenecks so as you
see continuous improvement is all about
people process and tools thanks for
watching this video if you have any
questions or comments be sure to drop a
line below if you want to see more
videos like this in the future be sure
to LIKE and subscribe