The rewards of advanced agile and DevOps adoption

In today’s fiercely competitive environment for customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, agile and DevOps are driving happier customers and employees. Results from a new CA Technologies global study reveal that advanced users of agile or DevOps realized significant increases of up to 52 percent in customer satisfaction and up to 50 percent in employee productivity.

The results showed a 30 percent advantage in employee recruitment and retention for companies that used agile and DevOps together to improve the working atmosphere for their employees – a huge benefit when you consider the shortage of talent in IT and the costs associated with attracting and retaining the best employees.

In total, 74 percent of respondents who added DevOps to agile implementations reported improvements in employee recruitment and retention versus 57 percent for agile-only users. When combining agile and DevOps practices, users also reported an increase of 45 percent in employee productivity, compared to those only using agile. Further, respondents found that adding DevOps practices to an agile working environment:

• Improved customer satisfaction by an additional 29 percent
• 78 percent of users who paired agile and DevOps reported an increase in customer experience, versus only 58 percent of agile-only users.

Business benefits

With 81 percent of executives confirming that agile and DevOps are critical to successful digital transformation, the study showed that both practices resulted in significant business benefits, and that together, they enhanced the positive impact even further. Compared to those that only use agile methodologies, the surveyed organizations that have adopted both agile and DevOps:

• Improved new business growth by 63 percent more
• Increased operational efficiency by an additional 41 percent
• Improved IT-related costs by an additional 65 percent than agile-only environments.

“We’re making a direct correlation between the technology and tools that we use in development to real business benefits,” said Jeff Scheaffer, general manager, Continuous Delivery, CA Technologies. “Pairing the DevOps paradigm with agile practices gives organizations of all sizes a competitive advantage with increases in employee productivity and satisfaction that is resulting in a loyal customer base.”

Why you should scale beyond IT

While more than four in five businesses are using each of these practices to some degree, a ‘maturity gap’ remains with only a third having deployed either practice widely across the organization, according to the study. Yet the benefits of advanced adoption extend far beyond the purview of IT. The wider benefits available to the surveyed businesses that embraced these practices across the organization experienced:

• A 40 percent improvement in time-to-decision (the time to act on new opportunities) for advanced agile users, compared to 33 percent for basic users
• A 42 percent improvement in speed to market, for advanced DevOps users compared to 24 percent for basic users
• 88 percent of advanced agile adopters, and 87 percent of advanced DevOps users witnessed an improvement in customer experience.

“Today’s competitive market requires that organizations take steps to expand and embed their use of agile and DevOps across the enterprise,” said Angela Tucci, general manager, Agile Management, CA Technologies. “The results are clear – embracing a combined approach reduces cycle times and makes sure that execution is aligned to strategy, ultimately for customer benefit.”