15 teams, 1 shared monolith, 1 release every 6 months, and product demand for 1 release every 2 weeks. How do you know where to start with Continuous Delivery, when you’re surrounded by technology and organisational challenges?
This is the journey of 15 teams and their 1 shared monolith, at a federal Belgian agency. They increased their throughput from bi-annual releases to fortnightly releases in under 4 months, achieving a state of Continuous Delivery.
We used the Improvement Kata as a continuous improvement framework to execute and measure organisational change, Value Stream Mapping to analyse the current delivery process, and the Theory Of Constraints to choose which changes to apply first and start off the organisational changes we needed to improve quality and drive down lead times.
Six months after achieving Continuous Delivery, I realised it was not the plan that helped the organisation. Instead, it was Fear Conversations that helped the organisation. They allowed us to uncover, locate and understand the stakeholders’ fears in order to mitigate these fears and navigate the difficult conversations we had to have.
If you thought Continuous Delivery was just for the happy few having trendy microservices, think again!