Create common workflows and processes across delivery teams. Having common workflows enables better communication and visibility across teams by providing a shared language for teams to understand release status, where different teams are in processes, etc. This is a great starting point for improving cross-team collaboration and visibility. The largest organizational gap between low- and high-maturity organizations is a lack of common workflows and processes.

Adopt platform teams. Platform teams provide core services to customer- or business-facing development teams. Such services might include private cloud, curated public cloud access, network, middleware, the continuous delivery toolchain itself, and various operational capabilities such as automated monitoring and change management.

Establish software supply chain management. Version control, of both source and packaged artifacts, is critically important. Use the right tools to ensure you understand the version and lineage of anything you are deploying in your environment.

Use feature flags. Feature flags are a powerful tool to derisk delivery. Features are deployed in an “off” state and can be gradually rolled out to increasingly large user bases through careful application of feature flags, giving more control over deployment and the ability to quickly roll back functionality that may not be scaling well or otherwise misbehaving.

Use feature flags. Feature flags are a powerful tool to derisk delivery. Features are deployed in an “off” state and can be gradually rolled out to increasingly large user bases through careful application of feature flags, giving more control over deployment and the ability to quickly roll back functionality that may not be scaling well or otherwise misbehaving.

Create clear channels/protocols for interteam communication. Your individual teams may be doing well on their own, but bigger goals require coordination. If teams are reinventing communication channels, delivery will suffer. Without introducing bureaucracy, ensure that team-to-team coordination is frictionless and easily accessed. Chat is trendy, email is the default, and wikis are good for joint creation. However, don’t overlook workflow—sometimes you need it. Bring a product mindset there as well, focusing on customer satisfaction and measured, streamlined delivery.

Understand where bottlenecks are in the SDLC. End-to-end “value stream management” will be essential for you to get to the next level. With the right analytics across your delivery pipeline, you can identify choke points and accumulating work in progress. Take decisive action when and where you see these signals: Limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, challenge stage gates, implement automation, and increase capacity.

Embrace continuous deployment. Continuous deployment is the elite subset of continuous delivery, the organizational capability to deploy new features more or less on demand. Enable all development teams to push code through production. Note that having this capability doesn’t mean you are necessarily employing it. What it means is that your digital delivery capabilities are no longer a constraint; other business concerns (like customer impact or organizational change management) move to the fore.

Enable self-service delivery capabilities. Development teams should not wait on human-mediated workflows if at all possible. Services such as continuous deployment, test data management, static and dynamic analysis, performance testing, and provisioning of various resources should be as automated as possible. Onboarding to monitoring, knowledge management, and service management platforms should be similarly straightforward, again not requiring time-consuming solutions consulting. An authorized role and budget ID should enable most services.

Provide toolchain flexibility where it makes sense. Diverse, highly scaled organizations require diverse delivery capabilities. Deploying code to a mainframe is different than modern cloud-native microservices. Use a solution to orchestrate the extended toolchain that centralizes and integrates information from across the SDLC, enabling better visibility, management, measurement, and audit of software delivery activities.