1. Devops “5 Slide”
Business
Case

2. Peter Lamar
◦ Principle, Manta Technologies
◦ Course Director, Techtown Training
◦ Developer at EA Sports, Product Manager at Google and Cisco
◦ @ptlamar

3. Direction
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
◦ Excerpt from Alice in Wonderland

4. Who is this talk for?
Anyone who wants money (from a business
decision maker) to do something
◦ Learn new tools
◦ Adopt a new technique
◦ Change the organizational structure
◦ Address technical debt
◦ Invest in infrastructure
◦ Get paid to play with some new technology for
an indefinite amount of time
Decision makers
typically:
• Non-Technical
• Sales background
• Consulting for Finance
background in C-Suite

5. Start with the end in mind
Revenue Cost Profit
Revenue++ Cost-- Profit++OR

6. Metrics
Decision makers generally don’t like open ended investments with vague promises of an return
on investment. They actually would prefer guaranteed revenue with zero risk.
◦ We cannot (should not) promise this.
◦ We can however, present a well constructed argument to support our Devops goals supported by
Metrics and Facts

7. 1. Business Objective
Introduce an idea/initiative.
Example for Use:
An idea/high-level concept to a business roadmap for funding

8. 1. Business Objective (Example)
Introduce an idea/initiative.
“Utilization on our cloud resources is terrible. Average CPU % is 5%. Modern Containerization
techniques could lower our cloud bill (Cost--) by 50%.”
“We currently release software quarterly. If we adopt Continuous Integration and Delivery then
releasing every two weeks is obtainable. This would give us a higher feature velocity and enable us to
be much more responsive to customer needs (Revenue++).”
”20% of our tickets are issues with our server hardware failures from our 20 different configurations. If
we can standardize on a single server type then we can anticipate more similar failures, less failures
and faster ticket resolution (Cost--) && (Revenue++).

9. 2. Project Definition
What problem is being solved?
◦ What are the business problems /opportunities that reveal the value of this Project?
Provide a summary of the proposed solution

10. 2. Project Definition (Example)
What problem is being solved?
◦ What are the business problems /opportunities that reveal the value of this Project?
“Utilization on our cloud resources is terrible. Average CPU % is 5%. Our Cloud bill has been growing
by x% a year”
“We currently release software quarterly. We spent lots of effort on our manual deployments. We
have customers who ask for new features daily.”
Provide a summary of the proposed solution
“Modern Containerization techniques could lower our cloud bill (Cost--) by 50%.”
“If we adopt Continuous Integration and Delivery then releasing every two weeks is obtainable. This
would give us a higher feature velocity and enable us to be much more responsive to customer needs
(Revenue++).”

11. 3. High-Level Business Case
Expectations
• State the expected high-level results and deliverables
• Describe the new or modified business processes impacted by the project
Provide high-level overview of the project proposal requirements, including, but not limited to:
 Business Requirements
- Related Strategic Goals (Organization Level)
- Related Tactical Goals (Functional Level)
- Related Operational Management Goals (Staff Level)
 Functional Requirements
 User Requirements
Financial benefits analysis, for example:
- State the high level financial benefits of doing this project. If there are none state “none”
•Other benefits analysis
– list any additional benefits of doing this project
– identify Key Performance Indicators that will be impacted by this project

12. 3. High-Level Business Case (Example)
Expect to have a Continuous integration and Delivery capability that can deploy a full production build in 48 hours.
This requires:
◦ 1. Increasing code coverage from 40-90% Unit test coverage
◦ 2. Deploying a local Jenkins Instance
◦ 3. Configuring Jenkins with necessary plugins
◦ 4. Integration with Slack to enable channel updates of builds/Remote build kickoffs
Estimated increased potential of hotfixes from quarterly to bi-weekly, improving by a factor of 6 enabling revenue uplift of x%
Other benefits:
◦ Anticipated stability improvement from smaller, more frequent deployments
◦ Anticipated feature velocity improvements as well from less broken builds (spent 15% on build downtime historically)

13. 2016 Puppet Labs State of Devops
Report: Cost--

14. 2016 Puppet Labs State of Devops
Report: Cost--

15. 2016 Puppet Labs State of Devops Report
: Revenue++
Improve your product development cycles:
• Get new features and products to market faster.
• Release with fewer bugs.
• Experiment more.
• Roll out results of successful experiments to new
markets.
Improve data collection and analysis:
• Get better business intelligence about your customers.
Improve your website:
• Drive more customer engagement.
• Drive more sales and/or leads.
Improve services you offer:
• Drive customer retention.
• Get more referrals.
• Get more incremental revenue from existing customers.

16. Planning

17. 4. Potential Roadmap
17
Phase 1
Name of phase 4Name of phase 3Name of phase 2Name of phase 1
Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4
Timing
Key Tasks
Deliverables
Text
•Task 1
•Task 2
•Task 3
•Deliverable 1
•Deliverable 2
Text
•Task 1
•Task 2
•Task 3
•Deliverable 1
•Deliverable 2
Text
•Task 1
•Task 2
•Task 3
•Deliverable 1
•Deliverable 2
Text
•Task 1
•Task 2
•Task 3

18. 5. Headcount
Resources Needed
Role Name(s) FYxx FYxx Add
As
Nec.
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 …
Project Mgmt
Product Owner
Software Engineer
Dev Test
Operations
(add other roles as necessary)

19. Anticipate Objections!
Objections
Decision maker answers a phone during
your presentation
Decision makers excessively focus on
irrelevant details i.e. bike-shedding
Decision makers have thoughtful,
insightful objections
Decision makers outnumber you during
presentation
Response
Stay calm, wait for them to finish.
Keep slides short and focused (minimize
your attack surface)
Anticipate top three objections answer
them in presentation (inoculation)
Bring 1-2 friendly advocates to sit in the
room as well

20. Additional Slides (as needed)
◦ Risks, ranked by severity/Probability of occurrences
◦ 2-3 project alternatives
◦ Headcount cost
◦ Resource cost
◦ Broader corporate strategic alignment
Remember, less is more when it comes to slides
◦ Slides are good, but working code/prototypes/demos are GREAT