Love containers, love devops, love Openshift… where’s my business case? (Part 2)
Part one of this blog post was really about the business case, what it is, how to build one. The first part of the blog did not really tell you anything about how to build your business case for the title, “Devops, PaaS & Openshift”. That’s where this post comes in, process and tools to help you build that business case! I know, I hate process too, but there is a small process to follow.
The process and tools that I have put together are not perfect and do need refinement, but that’s where the community comes in, take the pieces I have built and make them better by using them and contributing back! I love Opensource and that’s what makes it great.
A Process
Ok, so here’s the process. It’s pretty straightforward and broken into four stages.
1 — Identify the initiative: This is part of the “Know Your Business” that I talked about in the original post. This is around identifying business needs, stakeholders, projects, business pains and drivers.
2 — Select & Build: Helps you identify the business use case and provides a set of calculators that you can make use of to work out your cost benefits.
3 — Identify costs: How much organisational change and how much will it cost?
4 — Final Business Case: Pulling it all together.
Step 1 — Identify Initiative
Part of step 1 is to identify what you think your Openshift initiative is for? What are you going to be using it for? For me, Openshift usage falls into three categories within my customers.
Some customers just want to use Openshift as a container runtime. They see the benefits in using the tooling to build, orchestrate, deploy and manage containers at scale. This is cool, but has a very different impact on your business case than if you were building a PaaS.
This is where it gets interesting, some customers want a PaaS for their part of the business, building devops agility in their teams and using Openshift as the tooling to deliver that requires change, in IT and in the way the department delivers IT
This is where it gets difficult, some customers see PaaS and Openshift as a game changer for the whole organisation. Building out devops and really transforming how the business and IT work together to deliver business function through software requires organisational change that goes beyond a single group or function.
Other aspects of Identifying initiative include
- Identify Business Need
- Identify Projects
- Identify Budget
- Identify Key stakeholders
Your organisation may have different project functions that you may want to identify, but the key, for me is to quickly identify the business need. Try to consolidate the business need into a high level business objective as below:
We will use the above high level business drivers to build out our business case details in step 2.
Step 2 — Select & Build
The second step in our process will take the high level business objectives and decompose them into specific lower level technical cases.
For each of the high level business cases that have been identified we can decompose into our technical sub business cases. For each of the above business cases we aim to have a supporting set of spreadsheet calculators to help define the costs and benefits. For example, the high level business case, “Reduce Operational Costs” has been decomposed into three lower level sub business cases:
001-Developer Productivity
002-Deployment Efficiency
003-Infrastructure Cost reduction
For each of the “Sub Business Cases” I have created an accompanying spreadsheet calculator that aims to give you an idea of how to calculate the cost benefits of the case. An example of the sub case “003-Infrastructure Cost reduction” is shown below. This calculator expects inputs about your IT infrastructure estate, along with applications running on that estate and works out what that infrastructure looks like, when containerised, running on Openshift.
IMPORTANT — Know Your IT!!
Now this is important. Each of the calculation spreadsheets are aimed at providing you with a head start on calculating the cost benefits of adopting PaaS, containers and devops. The numbers are typical numbers gained through experience, BUT they are not your organisation, only YOU can provide the inputs needed to really calculate the business benefit with YOUR organisation. Take these spreadsheets and change them to match what you see!
Once you have selected the high level business cases and started to calculate benefits, then onto step 3.
Step 3 — Identify Cost
Although there are some costs identified in the calculators for step 2, the highest cost in your business case is for the actual implementation of a devops agile process and the tooling to support. This is important, it’s a change in the way we deliver software, faster, more regularly and with the business. It’s a change in how the business interacts with IT to deliver the IT that they need. How much it costs to change is the key. There are many articles and guidance on devops and what it really means to build agility into your IT and business that I won’t cover here, but what is important to realise is that devops is not just about technology, you need to understand the impact that it has on how you organise and deliver IT. Working at Red Hat, we have created a maturity calculator called “Ready to Innovate” that I will use as the basis for calculating costs of implementing change. The originators of “Ready to Innovate” were Red Hat consulting services, take a look at the following Blog http://ready-to-innovate.com/blog/using-rti/using-ready-to-innovate-rti/, alternatively please contact your local Red Hat team if you need to know more.
Are you Ready to Innovate?
The first stage of calculating the costs of implementing a PaaS is to take a look at your organisation. How mature you are at things like dev and ops automation, tooling, methodology, strategy, architecture and resourcing are key to understanding the costs involved with taking advantage of containers and PaaS to build agility into your IT.
Red Hat “Ready to Innovate” is a simple maturity calculation that scores both your dev and ops within your organisation across the following five areas:
1 — Automation
How mature are your automation processes, from no automation through to 90% of your dev and ops being fully automated.
2 — Methodology
Do you have well defined methodologies, from none or outsourced IT through to a full devops culture with well defined methods for delivering devops
3 — Architecture
Do you have well defined architectural principles? A scoring from ad-hoc tooling and architecture through to, 90% of all IT delivered through well defined architectural processes, tooling and governance.
4 — Strategy
Do you have a strategy aligned to delivering business agility? From an ad-hoc delivery of IT capability through to IT and Business driven innovation strategies.
5 — Resources
Finally, do you have the right level of resources in place to deliver agility? From traditional silos of operations and developers delivering projects through to 100% cross functional devops focused teams.
A simple scoring against each of these areas for both dev and ops results in your “Ready to Innovate” maturity score, measuring your capability for both dev and ops to deliver agility through PaaS, containers and devops.
Calculate the costs.
We use the outputs of the “Ready to Innovate”, as inputs into a cost calculator “000-Implementation Costs Supporting Calculations”. Remember one of our steps of “Know your business” asked about your use of Openshift and PaaS? Well, this is important, as the implications of your use case means that the effort required to build a PaaS will be completely different if you are just building a container runtime against building an Enterprise wide PaaS.
The first part of the cost calculation is to select the use case. Entering an “x” against one of the three use cases in the spreadsheet, primes the calculations.
Once you have selected your use, then you need to enter your “Ready to innovate” results into the dev and ops sections of the spreadsheet.
Once you have entered both of the above, then we can work out where your organisation sits within each of the capabilities required. Below, the green boxes highlight your current capability, where the red boxes highlight where you ought to be.
Adding the costs.
The next tab of the calculator looks at each of the capabilities in detail and based on the deficient areas identified in “Ready to Innovate” tab, will highlight the areas of investment and the associated costs that will be incurred.
Important — Know your Business!!
Now, this is important. The spreadsheet contains typical costs activities associated with acquiring the capabilities identified in the first part of the calculator, BUT these are just indicators. You need to figure out exactly what YOUR costs will be. The activities and numbers here are what I have seen in other organisations, but they are not your organisation. As with all of the calculators, you need to align them to what you know in your business. My aim of sharing this process and calculating spreadsheets is to give you a head start with the information so that you can then go ahead and figure out your business case!
Where can I get all of the tools used here?
Ok, so you have read my “Important” caveats about the tools and spreadsheets used, you know that you need to do some work here, and identify the numbers and activities… right?
I am assuming that the answer to that is yes!
In that case, you can find all of the material in github at: https://github.com/gcolman/OpenshiftBusinessCase
This is all community based and open, so please take what you need and if you come up with some good stuff, then let me know or feel free to make improvements and submit pull requests to the github repo
Step 4 — Final Business Case
Finally, we are almost there! After weeks of reviewing your business, your IT, choosing the right use cases and carefully working out the business benefits and cost implications you are ready to create your final business case to wow the CFO and gain funding to transform the way you deliver IT!
From each of the business cases you have calculated the cost benefits. Each of these add up to savings being made by the business over a time period (each of the cases are based on multi year savings). We then worked out the total cost implications of implementing the IT and organisational change, from both of these we can then work out our total investment and the total return on that investment over a payback period.
Part three “Love Openshift — The final Business Case (Part 3)” talks about the steps to building that final business case.
