The speed at which companies can transform ideas into functional, market-ready solutions is essential to staying relevant and driving innovation. DevOps plays a vital role in this process, going beyond technical tasks to act as a strategic bridge between development and operations, enabling faster and higher-quality delivery. At the core of this approach are the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics, which provide an objective way to assess and improve performance.

Strong interdepartmental relationships are equally critical to aligning business objectives with IT resources. Business Relationship Management (BRM) connects business with IT, ensuring that technology investments directly support organizational goals. This article will address the BRM principles that drive alignment, enhance collaboration, and help companies achieve sustainable success.

Finally, we will explore the emerging concept of Platform Engineering, a new direction for companies already well-versed in DevOps, offering new opportunities to streamline operations, increase efficiency, and foster innovation.

DevOps Time-to-Market with DORA Metrics

DORA metrics have become a standard for evaluating how DevOps impacts software delivery speed and system stability. These metrics include:

1. Deployment Frequency: How often new features or improvements are delivered to customers, reflecting the team’s agility.
2. Lead Time for Changes: The time from development to delivery, useful for identifying bottlenecks that may delay releases.
3. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): How quickly the system recovers from failures, essential for minimizing downtime.
4. Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that cause issues, providing insights into stability and quality.

These metrics go beyond simple data; they help align DevOps with business objectives, ensuring that every change adds sustainable value and improves speed and reliability.

Unlocking DevOps' Strategic Potential

DevOps is not just about accelerating development but also about driving business success in several key scenarios:

A robust DevOps setup enables businesses to test and release new features confidently, using A/B testing in controlled environments to gather early feedback, reduce risks, and enhance customer satisfaction. Infrastructure automation and the use of containers ensure scalability and resilience during demand surges, such as seasonal promotions, maximizing returns and delivering a positive user experience. 

Automated testing and continuous integration detect issues early, reducing rework costs and ensuring product quality. DevOps pipelines enable quick responses to customer feedback, improving user experience and facilitating the incremental adoption of new features, promoting greater loyalty. Real-time monitoring tools provide valuable insights into release performance, allowing data-driven adjustments that enhance operational efficiency.

Aligning DevOps and BRM for Strategic Advantage

DevOps can be a powerful enabler of business success, but aligning it with organizational goals unlocks even more potential. This is where Business Relationship Management (BRM) bridges IT and business priorities:

The Business Relationship Manager (BRM) plays a key role in connecting IT and business goals, ensuring that DevOps efforts align with strategic priorities. Maintains a continuous feedback loop between business units and DevOps, adjusting practices to evolving needs. Highlights the business value of DevOps initiatives, clearly communicating their impact and ensuring ongoing executive support. Together, BRM and DevOps foster a culture of agility and resilience, capable of quickly adapting to market changes.

Building Partnerships Between Teams

The Role of BRM in DevOps

In many companies, Business Relationship Management (BRM) is not a distinct function but a set of responsibilities taken on by individuals from other functions, such as product management, business strategy, or operations. These professionals act as BRMs to bridge the gap between business and IT, aligning technology initiatives with broader organizational goals.

The BRM role is less about a formal title and more about skills in communication, strategic alignment, and cross-functional understanding. For example, a product manager who understands market demands and customer pain points can act as a BRM, ensuring that DevOps initiatives focus on areas that will add high customer value and support business growth.

In practice, the responsibilities of the BRM (Business Relationship Manager) involve acting as a link between the DevOps teams and the strategic objectives of the business. This includes understanding critical priorities at each moment, such as customer satisfaction and compliance, ensuring that technical work is aligned with business needs. Additionally, BRM facilitates a continuous flow of feedback between DevOps and other departments, promoting alignment with constantly evolving demands. It also translates technical metrics, such as DORA metrics, into relevant business results, ensuring stakeholder support. Finally, it supports agile and strategic responses to market changes or new priorities. In short, this role can be performed by different individuals within the organization, promoting flexibility and continuous alignment between IT and business.

To maximize the strategic impact of DevOps, companies must foster strong partnerships across the organization:

1. Aligning DevOps with the business roadmap: Ensure DevOps work is aligned with broader goals to meet key business needs.
2. Cross-functional collaboration: DevOps teams must work with product, marketing, and support teams to gain a complete view of customer needs.
3. Leveraging ecosystem partnerships: External partnerships with technology providers and experts can provide new skills and insights, driving innovation.
4. Promote continuous improvement: Cultivate a DevOps mindset focused on optimizing processes and delivering continuous value.

Key business benefits of DevOps

Adopting DevOps brings multiple strategic and operational advantages:

DevOps offers a number of strategic benefits to companies, including faster and more efficient time to market, allowing them to seize new opportunities with agility. Software quality is improved through automated testing that identifies problems early, ensuring greater reliability. Rapid response to customer feedback promotes loyalty and trust, while infrastructure and deployment automation increases productivity by freeing developers for higher-value tasks. Additionally, efficiency gains reduce maintenance costs, and improved scalability enables flexible deployments that adapt to changing demands. Security is strengthened by integration into the development cycle, mitigating risks, while collaboration and continuous improvement foster innovation. Finally, DevOps ensures a stronger alignment between IT and the company's strategic objectives, maximizing its impact on the business.

Embracing Platform Engineering: The Next Step in the Evolution of DevOps

As DevOps practices evolve, Platform Engineering is emerging as a natural next step, providing a scalable way to increase productivity, consistency, and agility:

1. Centralized platform capabilities: A unified platform provides standardized tools and services, enabling self-service for application teams and simplifying infrastructure management.
2. Increase developer productivity: Offloading infrastructure concerns to a central platform allows developers to focus on building features, speeding delivery.
3. Cultural transformation: Platform engineering promotes a product-centric mindset, encouraging collaboration and efficiency.

4. Improved governance and compliance: Centralization of platform resources ensures consistency across applications, reinforcing security and regulatory standards.

    

Understanding Platform Engineering: An Evolution Beyond DevOps

Platform Engineering is a strategic evolution of DevOps, creating an internal "platform" that supports developers with a set of standardized tools, processes, and services. Unlike traditional DevOps, where teams manage their own infrastructure pipelines and configurations, Platform Engineering centralizes these functions, giving developers access to a self-service platform that simplifies infrastructure management and automates repetitive tasks.

Main differences from traditional DevOps:

Platform engineering brings centralization and standardization by managing infrastructure and operational tools in a unified way, ensuring consistency for all development teams, unlike traditional DevOps teams that often operate in silos, creating inconsistencies. With self-service interfaces, it allows developers to deploy applications, manage resources and perform tests independently, focusing on product features while the platform takes care of provisioning, scaling and maintenance. Additionally, it promotes governance and compliance by enforcing consistent security and operation standards, reducing the risk of inappropriate configurations.

For example, a company launching multiple customer-facing applications might replace individually managed pipelines and infrastructure with a shared solution developed by the platform engineering team. This solution includes pre-configured CI/CD pipelines, automated testing tools, and containerized environments accessible through a self-service portal. This allows product teams to deploy their applications in a standardized environment, accelerating delivery and ensuring consistent security and performance.

In essence, platform engineering expands DevOps by creating a scalable and reusable foundation, allowing you to optimize resources, improve security, and increase developer productivity. By taking on the most complex operations, it positions the organization to deliver at greater scale and speed, without compromising governance or quality.

Conclusion

By adopting Platform Engineering, companies can further increase the value delivered through their technology investments, positioning themselves as adaptive and innovative leaders in their industries.

Implementing DevOps solutions guided by DORA metrics is a strategic step for companies looking to accelerate Time-to-Market. Through continuous integration, delivery and real-time monitoring, organizations build a robust foundation for rapid, flexible and results-driven innovation. These DevOps practices enable rapid responses to market changes, prioritize customer satisfaction, and ensure that each release delivers a tangible competitive advantage.

Additionally, aligning DevOps with Business Relationship Management (BRM) amplifies its impact, bridging the gap between IT and business. This alignment promotes continuous feedback, demonstrates clear business value, and supports agility, enabling companies to remain resilient and responsive to change. Together, DevOps and BRM create a cohesive approach to business and IT alignment, driving sustainable growth.

For organizations with mature DevOps practices, adopting Platform Engineering represents a powerful evolution. This approach centralizes platform resources, simplifies developer workflows, and strengthens governance, paving the way for even greater efficiency and scalability. Embracing platform engineering not only increases the value of DevOps, but positions companies to lead in an increasingly competitive and dynamic market.