14 signs your cloud journey may be off track
Is your IT team waiting for a network firewall burn or to spin up a server, which is impacting your project – costing you time and money as your engineers wait around? If so, you are suffering from a serious problem: the Company Queue. Let’s explore this problem and what you can do about it.
The Costly Waiting Game
No matter where you are on your cloud journey, company queues indicate your organisation is not making the most of its cloud investment.
Company queues are a natural outcome of the complex RACIs we discussed in a previous article, Sign #4 Your RACI matrix is overcomplicating operations and causing friction. These RACIs determine who is responsible for what as well as how teams are engaged to fulfil a request.
As noted in that article, project teams are generally required to engage an expert who will perform the firewall burn, the server request, or the service-integration build on behalf of the project.
Since most organisations only have a limited number of experts, project teams must wait their turn to access the service, thereby waiting in the Company Queue.
Waiting in a queue is bad enough, but if the queue is not first-come, first-serve, then the problems compound. This often happens when projects are bumped by a more “strategic” initiative. This leads to frustration, escalations, and attempts to circumvent the process as project teams leverage connections or look to position themselves as more “strategic” than others.
Making matters worse, organisations may have a GateKeeper who, due to their unique position, can determine who has priority to their IT service. We will discuss this problem in a future article, suffice to say, priority disputes simply lead to more delays and increased costs.
The obvious solution is to break up the sequential nature of the Company Queue, making it possible for project teams to access the service in parallel.
The self-serve, on-demand nature of cloud services makes this possible. In Sign #4 Your RACI matrix is overcomplicating operations and causing friction, we introduced the concept of a Cloud Shared Responsibility Model, which is comprised of two actors: the cloud provider responsible for operating the service and the cloud user using the service either via the console, CLI, or API.
Understanding the user journey
In this article, we’ll take another step and introduce the cloud user journey. This is the journey the cloud user takes to make use of - or “consume” - the service offered by the cloud provider.
We have explored cloud users, your IT product teams, in previous articles, but to quickly recap:
Your IT product team is a mix of product and technical staff who deliver valuable features to the business.
The traditional IT journey for project teams is well-known:
1. Kick-off new project
2. Request quotes from the IT (network, server, security ….) Teams
3. Business case approval
4. Engage the IT experts to fulfil the requests
5. Deliver the project
6. Hand over to the operations team
In contrast, the cloud user journey for IT product teams is based on the product development model:
1. Kick-off new product line
2. Request seed funding for initial feature development
3. Register with required cloud services
4. Product consumes cloud services via console, CLI or API
5. Deliver the product features
The key difference is step 4; in the traditional journey, multiple project teams engaging a limited number of IT experts lead to the Company Queue. In the cloud user journey, each IT product team can consume the cloud service at the same time and, as a result, experience no waiting.
If your teams are waiting in a Company Queue, you’re not getting the best value or performance from your cloud investment.
At DigiRen, we have years of experience building cloud solutions, specialising in Cloud Operating Models that enable businesses to take advantage of their cloud investment. Introducing a cloud user journey to eliminate queues and improve organisational agility is a key component of the Cloud Operating Model. If you would like to learn more, please contact us at solutions@digiren.com.au and follow us on LinkedIn.
The next article in this series further explores the role of The Gatekeeper and how they can be an impediment to the introduction of your cloud user journey and Cloud Operating Model.