Enterprise DORA Metrics: Scaling Measurement Across Value Streams and the Organization

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are a ubiquitous measure of DevOps performance. These metrics are used in nearly every enterprise engaged in software development. DORA metrics help measure DevOps maturity, identify bottlenecks, and guide quality and process improvements. Despite their popularity, DORA metrics are generally considered difficult to measure and are primarily used by technical teams within the context of their respective domains.

With the proliferation of DevOps tools generating data for DORA metrics, and different teams across enterprises using a variety of tools, it is increasingly challenging to consolidate such data consistently across teams. This process is typically manual, time-consuming, and error-prone, often resulting in incorrect or outdated data.

For instance, a large financial services organization invested significant resources over two years to build an in-house system for collecting and reporting on DORA metrics across hundreds of applications. This substantial investment highlights both the value of enterprise DORA metrics and the difficulty of implementing them.

The challenge of scaling measurement

Most enterprises need to measure and track various metrics, such as Agile and Flow metrics, to gain a holistic measure of the health of a software product value stream. These metrics are typically used for local optimization, rather than global optimization that spans product value streams, portfolios, and divisions. This lack of effective measurement at scale can result in misleading conclusions, potentially optimizing individual silos at the expense of the holistic value stream.

Senior managers and executives often find it difficult to interpret metrics, such as DORA and Flow, in the context of their business needs and outcomes. This is especially true for teams in non-digital native organizations. However, as teams pursue digital transformations, it is crucial to measure and track DORA metrics at scale, particularly for senior executives. Years of DORA research indicate that organizations with high DORA maturity are more likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals, and to achieve higher market cap growth.

Introducing ValueOps Insights

ValueOps Insights is an analytics solution that aligns enterprises by measuring and improving the performance of their digital value streams, resulting in better business outcomes. The solution provides increased visibility into product value stream performance for all stakeholders, from engineers to executives, by making it easy to collect, normalize, correlate, and analyze data from multiple sources across the value stream.

The ValueOps Insights approach to enterprise DORA metrics

Primarily, technical operators generate DORA metrics for the consumption of their respective teams. By automatically synthesizing the data at appropriate levels, ValueOps Insights democratizes access to DORA metrics, allowing senior leaders and executives to benefit from this intelligence.

Six key ways ValueOps Insights scales DORA measurements

1. Establish a standardized information model for DORA metrics. ValueOps Insights defines a standard information model for DORA and other metrics. Using ValueOps ConnectALL adapters, teams can easily aggregate and synthesize data from across diverse CI/CD tools.
2. Shift to a product-centric mindset. ValueOps Insights promotes a focus on long-lived digital assets (products and their components) rather than individual teams. As a result, ValueOps Insights supports digital transformation initiatives and allows for measurements at different levels of the product hierarchy.
3. Democratize DORA metrics. ValueOps Insights aggregates data across the product hierarchy, allowing various personas to view and analyze DORA metrics relevant to their level. This automated aggregation eliminates manual consolidation, democratizing access to DORA metrics and enhancing visibility and transparency.
4. Gain a better understanding of process maturity. By providing higher-level visibility, ValueOps Insights enables stakeholders to identify and direct improvements across portfolios or divisions. Additional analytics, such as statistical variance and analysis of outliers, help guide process improvements.
5. Cultivate alignment based on business context and outcomes. ValueOps Insights sets ideal targets for DORA metrics based on investment intent, aligning business needs with engineering capabilities. This business-centric approach helps senior leaders more consistently achieve their goals.
6. Correlation with Flow and other VSM metrics. ValueOps Insights measures alignment between business goals and delivery capacity, providing a consolidated alignment score based on DORA and Flow metrics. This helps leaders quickly identify misalignments and take corrective action.

Key benefits of automated enterprise DORA metrics

Enterprise DORA metrics offer numerous benefits for different stakeholders:

• Portfolio leaders and executives. Provides an overview of delivery maturity and measures alignment between business goals and delivery capabilities.
• Product and program managers. Fosters alignment between product-level business goals and delivery capabilities, enabling users to drill down into underlying components.
• Development teams. Saves time and effort in collecting and reporting on metrics.
• All stakeholders. Reduces friction between stakeholders by providing a common, accurate view of data across the organization.

Conclusion

ValueOps Insights offers an out-of-the-box solution for measuring and tracking DORA metrics at scale, promoting better alignment between business outcomes and engineering capabilities. The solution correlates DORA metrics with other metrics, enabling better optimization of the value stream.

Contact us today for a demo and start your journey towards greater efficiency and predictability with ValueOps Insights. Don’t let information silos hold your business back. Embrace the future of data management and unlock the full potential of your data with ValueOps Insights.