14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Are your IT teams still jumping through hoops to get approvals from architecture review boards, financial controllers, security, and operations – so they can move forward with their work? Are these approvals costing you time, causing disruption, and frustrating your team? If your teams are still jumping through approval hoops, then this is a sure sign you aren’t realising the full value from your cloud investment. This article explores why this is and what you can do about it.
Setting approvals to mitigate risks
Let’s be honest, nobody wants to be responsible for the company website going down for six hours during the busy season; or for the company logo splashed across news sites following a customer data leak; or explain to management why the budget for the new-fangled IT solution needs to be doubled before it can be deployed.
To reduce the likelihood of these events, IT organisations have added approval steps to manage change. These include architectural approvals to ensure designs meet company standards, security approvals to ensure the customer or sensitive data is not exposed to hackers, and financial approvals to ensure that funds can be released.
We discussed one of the more significant approval steps, the operational readiness checklist, in our previous Sign #9: Your IT teams are still divided between engineering and operations. In that article, our solution to that approval hoop was to align incentives across engineering and operations teams. In this article, we’ll look at how you can codify and automate approvals to reduce the frustration and disruption that comes with most approval hoops.
How approval hoops hinder a business
In most companies, approval hoops generally take the form of a gating process where stakeholders can review a particular proposal. Usually, project teams are required to present documentation, estimates, and designs for their proposals to company principals, who then examine the information and provide feedback that is then integrated into the proposals before final approval is given, and the project team can continue.
Despite the process sounding innocuous, approval hoops can cause serious disruption due to time delays. For example, simply preparing the documentation, ensuring the principals have read it, and then organising the meeting to run through the proposal may take weeks. If someone hasn’t read the documentation, can’t make the meeting, or has serious concerns with the proposal, then the project may be delayed even further.
While disruption is a serious problem for approval hoops, there is a second, less obvious problem. As approval hoops take a lot of time, they generally only happen during the initial phase of a project. Subsequent changes do not receive the same level of scrutiny and, as a result, bugs can creep in, exposing the organisation to operational, financial, and security risks.
Simplifying approval hoops through continuous integration and delivery
So, approval hoops are time consuming and generally only happen once. How does your cloud investment fit into this discussion? In Sign #7: Your IT-project pipeline is progressing slowly, we examined the cloud user journey and how it differed from the traditional IT user journey. In the latter, teams had to engage an expert to get something done, whereas in the former, Product IT teams can consume the service themselves via a GUI, console, or API.
For a Product IT team to take full advantage of these automated services, they must eventually implement a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) pipeline, which is used by DevOps teams to manage code changes and code deployment for years. There are many excellent articles explaining the benefits of these pipelines and how to use them.
For the purposes of this article, however, it is enough to say that sophisticated pipelines can now include operational, financial, security controls to codify and automate many of the approval hoops that previously used a gating process. Consequently, approval hoops no longer take days or weeks to complete – rather minutes or hours. They can also be performed every time there is a change rather than once at the start of the project.
In other words, codifying and automating approval hoops in CI/CD pipelines can reduce disruption to feature delivery as well as the operational, financial, security risks to your organisation.
If your teams are still expected to jump through hoops for approvals, then chances are you’re not realising the full value of your cloud investment. At DigiRen, we have years of experience building cloud solutions. We specialise in building Cloud Operating Models that enable businesses to take advantage of their cloud investment. Codifying and automating approval hoops within a sophisticated CI/CD pipeline will significantly reduce disruption and operational, financial & security risks. To learn more, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn.