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Software is infinitely flexible. It can be changed right up to the time the product is introduced. Sometimes it can be changed even later than that with things like software or firmware upgrades, websites, and software as a service (SaaS).

Software does have its disadvantages, too. Accurately scheduling long-term deliveries is difficult, and more than 50% of all software developed is either not used or does not meet its business intent. If executives managing software do not take these differences into account in their planning processes, they are likely to make the classic mistake of creating detailed, inaccurate plans for developing unused features. At the same time they are eliminating flexibility, which is the biggest advantage of software, by locking in commitments to these long-range plans.

From the excellent Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale.

DevOps ROI

Recently, for my column over at FierceDevOps, I opined about doing ROI for DevOps. This topic comes up a lot as I note in my Pivotal post on the topic. Here’s a summary/excerpt of the three ways of thinking through it: 1.) Bottoms-up ROI: We know everything and have put it in this spreadsheet …if you have a good handle on the costs during some period of time where you were doing DevOps, and the gain that resulted from that period of time, you could come up with a bottoms-up ROI analysis.
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Coté Memo #074: "Let's start an anonymous club."

It’s mostly links this week, with a big add video ad for my pal below: Get your lurn on [player.vimeo.com/video/121… Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to opinions around product. Check out more details, and if you use the code COTE when registering, you’ll get $250 off!
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There’s no easy way to model DevOps ROI

Think you can show DevOps ROI? Think again “What is the ROI for DevOps?” is a question that has been tossed my way frequently of late. There are numerous reasons why this is at the same time an absurd but also important question. Modeling DevOps ROI is absurd because predicting the gains and costs of a process, let alone one as new as DevOps, is difficult and dependent on all sorts of unique variables per organization.
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What does IT need to start doing to become a software defined business?

I was asked to talk to do an internal, “brown-bag” style talk at a company this week. I chose to do a slightly more technical-oriented version of the talk I tend to give, commentary and pointers on moving your orginization over to relying on more and more custom written software to run your business. Here, I give a brief business context and then throw out three areas to start focusing on if you’re interested in cloud, DevOps, and all this nonsense.
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Here’s how we can help push DevOps into the mainstream

Can DevOps declare victory yet? Not quite, but soon. Figuring out when a technology inflection point happens is always hard, if not impossible, in real-time. It’s easy to point backwards and say when ERP, agile software development, the Web, business intelligence, mobile or cloud suddenly became “normal.” I think DevOps is right at the door of that point, and as some recent Gartner predictions have proffered, we could see something like a quarter of all large enterprises using DevOps next year.
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The flywheel go-to-market model

The Flywheel Model differs from the Traditional Model in one fundamental regard. The enterprise sales team is exclusively inbound. They are explicitly denied the option of seeking business outside the customer base, and must gin up business from only existing customers. The enterprise sales team is an up-sell and cross-sell team. In fact, so is the mid-market sales team. Only the SMB marketing team is permitted to acquire new leads.
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The "purpose driven reader"

A number of trends in media have left most news sites catering to a new kind of reader. According to the stereotype, this reader doesn’t visit news home pages, relying on starting points like Facebook instead. This reader sees news as just another category of entertainment, an escape or time-killer, and believes “important news will find me”, not the other way around. News sites modeled on this reader are pressured to produce ever more content and expand well past their core competency, even when they start with a clear focus and dedicated readership.
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Team work bringing down the average

The workers were told, essentially, that they were to be rewarded for collective achievement rather than individually. So instead of maximizing individual satisfaction, which often comes through competition with other people, employees considered their impact on colleagues. The theory, which plays out in the results, is that with relative rankings, top performers reduce their effort to avoid hurting their co-workers’ egos and to prevent schisms in the team. That’s kind of sweet actually.
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How the pull nature of open source changes your partner strategy

In answering what Red Hat has to offer partners, CEO Jim Whitehurst says: So when we talk about containers, we talk about, here’s how, if a customer wants to implement containers, you can offer solutions to help them do that. And when we want to talk about OpenStack, well, here’s how you can offer an OpenStack solution in a supported way to run production applications. Here’s how you can actually deliver products and services around DevOps with our OpenShift and PaaS offerings.
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