Improving throughput and due date performance of IT DevOps teams.

Companies view Information Technology (IT) as a competitive advantage of the future. In recent years, IT departments have proven to have a significant impact on the business process improvement and better customer service, enabling organizations to become more competitive in the global marketplace. To meet these demands, many IT organizations are now transforming their software development and information technology operations to a combined team, called DevOps. However, with only organizational changes and no changes in how the IT DevOps teams manage their tasks, this is not easy to achieve, especially when there is a tension to keep all resources busy and overload them with a task by maintaining a high work-in-progress. As a result, organizations operating in this mode typically experience a significant degradation in their performance. The paper presents a simulation-based performance assessment that significantly improves the performance of task execution by DevOps teams. An approach is presented to determine how to load and allocate resources and an appropriate allocation of additional (reserve) resources to improve performance. The simulations show a possibility of a 135 percent improvement in the Throughput (the number of completed tasks), work-in-progress reduced to the level of one percent of the completed tasks and the time needed to complete tasks is over 17 times shorter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]