Why Up To 70% Of Platform Engineering Teams Fail To Deliver Impact

LONDON — Last hired, first fired remains nan rule of nan land. For level engineering teams, astir less than 5 years old, it whitethorn beryllium adjacent too. So galore struggle to make nan lawsuit for themselves.

Platform teams are emotion nan unit to link their method transportation to business goals, but astir are measuring nan incorrect things, if thing astatine all. This has location betwixt 60 and 70% of level projects failing to time off impact, pinch almost half of level teams disbanded aliases restructured wrong 18 months.

Much of this year’s Fast Flow Conf,  Team Topologies’ flagship event,  focused connected getting level take up — and why take isn’t nan only point level engineers should beryllium focusing on.

Matthew Meckes, elder containers master astatine Amazon Web Services (AWS), said astatine Fast Flow this period astir really to measurement nan maturity of your level truthful it will get top-down investment. He explained really to empower internal developer platform teams pinch metrics that conscionable mightiness prevention their jobs.

What’s Holding Platform Teams Back?

Even though it’s not moving awesome yet, there’s nary denying that platform engineering is pursuing its respective predecessors of agile, DevOps and cloud native — some successful becoming a tech manufacture modular and successful struggling to summation wide take aft years of trying.

Gartner predicts that 80% of ample package engineering organizations will person level engineering teams by 2026, up from 45% 4 years earlier. But nan tech manufacture doesn’t request much 18-month investments that yet get cut. Platform teams person to find a measurement to make semipermanent effect successful nan short word now.

Why do level teams fail? According to Meckes, it’s usually a operation of:

• Lack of merchandise mindset: Treating soul improvement platforms (IDPs) arsenic method artifacts, not services for developer customers to consume.
• Overcomplicating things: The other of nan erstwhile constituent — saying yes to everything and trying to support each workload, alternatively than focusing connected what benefits 80% of engineering teams.
• Misalignment pinch stakeholders: Platform engineers who deliberation they cognize what’s champion for developers, and past disregard merchandise managers and activity completely.
• Cultural and organizational barriers: Failing to present continuous betterment and to marketplace value-added to promote level adoption.
• Poor metrics: Maybe nan squad uses DORA metrics for throughput and stability, but fails to link them to business goals.

But, if you aren’t mature capable successful your level journey, Meckes said, you aren’t releasing faster while maintaining stability. He quoted  Dave Farley, co-author of nan book “Continuous Delivery”: “There is nary trade-off betwixt velocity and quality. If you want high-quality systems, you must build them quickly.”

The Importance of a Fast Feedback Loop and Iteration

Just arsenic nan dev teams they service do, level teams request to person a rhythm of smaller releases and faster feedback. So really tin you trim down nan clip to go a mature level engineering team? Not, Meckes said, by repeating nan aforesaid mistakes.

“We tin make marque new, caller mistakes, which tin beryllium really exciting, but hopefully won’t make nan aforesaid mistakes that we spot complete and complete again,” he said.

“If we’ve sewage really, really bully level fundamentals, and look astatine really awesome our cognition is, but it still really has only impacted 1 aliases 2 workloads wrong nan organization,” he added, your IDP mightiness beryllium bully connected paper, but it’s not a merchandise pinch users. In different words, it’s a waste.

To find that constituent wherever in-house customers are attracted to nan platform, alternatively than being pushed there, he said, level teams must genuinely perpetrate to a platform-as-a-product model and prioritize feedback from each stakeholders

“We person to found a measurement model that’s aligned to nan KPIs of nan business, truthful we tin proceed to warrant repeated investment,” Meckes said. “And we’re really, really focused connected developer experience.”

That means, for example, astatine a monolithic financial services organization, location can’t beryllium conscionable 1 level squad serving everyone.

“We’ve really sewage to hone successful to a mates of business units who are really going to spell put successful modern, continuous transportation and build thing that’s going to suit their usage case, that we tin really show value, that we tin past standard crossed nan remainder of nan world.”

How to Measure Your Platform’s Maturity

An axiom of subject — and engineering is simply a subject — is that you can’t amended what you don’t measure.

This is why nan Cloud Native Computing Foundation app improvement moving group created nan Platform Maturity Model, covering 5 areas of level investment:

• Team: Who is connected nan level squad and really it’s funded.
• Adoption: User onboarding and soul marketing.
• Interfaces: APIs, tools, chatbots, portals.
• Operations: Life rhythm management, including nan status of features.
• Measurement: Of nan level program’s value.

“How do we measurement nan worth successful a measurement nan business really cares about, that we tin communicate?” Meckes said. “So we tin inquire for much money, much headcount, much investment, twelvemonth aft year, arsenic we commencement to unlock worth from our expanding platform.”

The 4 levels of level maturity are:

1. Provisional: Ad-hoc, ticket-based, constricted capabilities.
2. Operational: Repeatable pathways, foundational tooling.
3. Scalable: Fully self-service.
4. Optimizing: Measuring each step.

Understanding nan CNCF Platform Maturity Model

The CNCF app improvement moving group conscionable released its aviator Platform Engineering Maturity Model Assessment to thief organizations bespeak connected these metrics. While it’s a speedy online quiz, you tin people out, talk and return notes — answers whitethorn not beryllium arsenic straightforward arsenic a yes aliases no. Use it to create an artifact that explains and measures your level team.

Meckes recommends carving retired a fewer hours for nan first assessment, but erstwhile you’ve sewage it down, consequent assessments should return astir an hour. Hopefully, pinch this exercise, you tin build an achievable roadmap for nan adjacent 4th aliases two.

Real-World Examples of Platform Maturity Assessments

He gave a mates of examples of wherever level teams showed maturity successful immoderate areas but lacked it successful others.

Example 1: Fairly Provisional

Measuring DORA metrics for nan level team, but not for nan improvement squad you’re serving. Next steps were to:

• Build connected operational excellence to make judge nan level is amended than what developers had before.
• Establish measurements attached to organizational KPIs to warrant repeated investment.
• Focus connected developer experience, pinch self-service tooling and finance successful business units that want to do modern continuous delivery.

Example 2: More Sophisticated

This institution was a mates of years into its level travel and had built a robust Kubernetes ecosystem pinch a broad measurement framework. However only 20% of workloads had been moved onto nan IDP. As Meckes said, “They’ve sewage this astonishing thing, and it’s not getting traction.”

This squad realized done this appraisal that it needed a dedicated merchandise head and a much centralized onboarding process for caller users. It besides had to reckon pinch constricted integration pinch nan remainder of nan package improvement life cycle.

“For them, it’s about, ‘How do we spell and build that adjacent feedback loop truthful we tin iterate connected self-service capabilities, commencement to book organization engagement and thrust take beyond those early adopters?’” Meckes said.

Driving Adoption and Securing Top-Down Investment

The key, he said, to top-down finance and communication: “We want to spell and do this thing: To spell and get nan astir retired of nan cloud. Then moving connected to building nan operations: How tin we build sustainable processes automation? And past it’s wherever it starts to get sticky.”

Because, he argued, nary matter really bully your operations gets, it’s ne'er going to thrust take alone. Platform teams request to support adaptive change.

“How do we build for these complex, ambiguous problems? How do we thief group learn?” Meckes asked. “This is wherever we’re going to deliberation astir adapting our level culture, transferring to a DevOps mindset and yet going to bring developers and operations together successful a measurement to collaborate, building developer-centric organizations wherever our developers are adjacent to nan product.”

Group Created pinch Sketch.