The DevOps Strategy Canvas is a framework to help you maximise your business outcomes while addressing the needs of your DevOps journey. It can provide enterprises, large and small, with a tool for creating a shared vision and unlocking the promise of DevOps.
For over a decade, DevOps has been a reference point for bringing technology transformation to life. Nearly every IT vendor has reshaped their marketing content to fit in the DevOps lingo everywhere. It not only has helped to boost the traction but also helped in better understanding of DevOps in business & leadership circles. However, more often than not, DevOps is considered a tooling topic relevant only to IT. The larger vision, business outcome etc. are rarely discussed.
When I ask technology leaders around DevOps strategy, I get mixed answers. Some say our DevOps strategy to automate the build pipeline, some say continuous delivery and some say it all about automate everything. Would you call this a DevOps strategy?
To add to the puzzle, we have new marketing terms introduced on regular intervals such as DevSecOps, DataOps, AIOps, BizDevOps etc. Then there are overlaps between IT strategy, Cloud Strategy, Automation Strategy and so on. The million dollar question is how all these come together to make business sense.
Some say our DevOps strategy is to automate the build pipeline, some say it is to setup continuous delivery and some say it’s all about automating everything.
Would you call this a DevOps strategy?What’s your DevOps Strategy?
DevOps strategy can help us streamline & simplify our overall approach towards complete application lifecycle realising successful business outcomes. In my other blog post, I have shared in great details, the reasons around why we need a DevOps Strategy and how to create one that reflects your organization (as opposed to just another imitation attempt).
Based on my extensive research and learning of over a decade, consulting and leading DevOps engagements in different industries and regions, I have created a innovative tool to capture all the details in a canvas called “DevOps Strategy Canvas – Accelerating Business Outcome (V1)“. It captures a full view of your business context, technology landscape, key challenges to craft an actionable DevOps transformation backlog.

Contribute to the Canvas
I believe that, as with any initiative, the best way to get the best possible version is through a sequence of “inspect and adapt” cycles based on feedback form community at large. As the DevOps Strategy Canvas gets used in companies of different sizes, and on different continents; it is truly universal. My goal is to capture insights and best practices from the global community and consolidate them into a continuously improving canvas. To that end, the DevOps Strategy Canvas is open source and is released under the CC4-BY-SA license.
The DevOps Strategy Canvas is open source and is released under the CC4-BY-SA license.
Next Steps
In next blog posts, I would write step by step blog posts to explain the Canvas with some filled in samples to demonstrate the wider appeal of it.
PS: If you need a PDF version of the DevOps Strategy Canvas, please reach out to me at contact at sandeepmvp.com