Enabling digital delivery at scale

Our priority was to create a new cloud platform to host services that could be scaled, developed and amended quickly and efficiently. With each of the organisations in the study we built a digital platform, which consisted of a suite of paved roads to provide a self-service and seamless experience to consuming development teams. These development teams worked in parallel as users of the platform to design and deliver new digital services. With each new consuming team the platform evolved to enable and meet their needs with the specific goals of reducing their time to market and improving the quality and reliability of their output.

This resulted in a platform of paved roads that provided fully automated, self-service cloud infrastructure. This was important to help with rapid scaling the digital delivery organisation by ensuring new teams could be effective from day one.

We also helped our customers adopt a “you build it, you run it” operating model, with a paved road for incident response. This allowed new digital services to be more reliable, with less outages and downtime.

The combination of paved roads developed to enable delivery teams and optimising the delivery organisation around a “you build it you run it” delivery model enabled the customers we worked with to seamlessly scale their delivery capability. With one organisation this approach supported them scaling from a small number of teams to around 80 teams over a three year period. By investing in this approach other customers have been able to scale teams up and down based on their needs and budget as the paved roads make it simpler to onboard and offboard developers and get them up to speed.

$61 million benefits from reduced costs and increased revenues

Forrester Research examined and compiled the benefits delivered from multiple customer projects into one, theoretical organisation. By partnering with Equal Experts, the composite organisation was able to develop and launch new services more quickly. Key benefits of the partnership included faster time to market, increased business revenues and higher service reliability.

Over a period of three years, Equal Experts helped the composite organisation to build and run a new digital platform, launch multiple differentiated digital services and embed a ‘you build it, you run it’ operating model.

The first new digital service was launched after seven months, 11 months earlier than expected. The adoption of ‘paved roads’ allowed for new services to be developed and delivered more quickly, generating 21 months of extra revenue in the first year of the project alone. This shorter delivery cycle generated an additional $41 million in profits for the organisation, by launching services and generating revenue earlier.

Each new digital service contributed $15 million on average in additional revenue. The services built with Equal Experts tended to outperform other services, generating 60% more revenue than those built outside the custom digital platform. This benefit was evident even after the project had finished.

The ‘paved road’ approach led to a reduction in manual effort managing environments for digital delivery teams. The composite organisation saved 13,000 hours of engineering time by developing paved roads to automate the provisioning and management of environments. This provided an estimated benefit of $716,000 over a three year period.

“We’ve been able to change the building of environments for a new product from a six-month project for provisioning all the infrastructure down to one day. Actually, even in a couple of hours we can spin it up now.” — Platform and operations manager, retail

During peak periods, the business can offer reliable and scalable services that cope with peaks in demand easily. For every minute that a digital service was unavailable, the retailer could lose an average of $4,000. Over three years, it’s estimated that the new digital platform would protect against losses in the region of $544,000.

“We used to be in a position where getting ready for Black Friday was a significant challenge. Equal Experts and their consultants have been able to help us reengineer our platform and our technology practices. We were able to go way beyond our typical levels of performance without any issue.” – Delivery and operations Manager, retail

This study from Forrester demonstrates the commercial value that can be realised through reducing time to market and reducing costs by:

1. investing in building paved roads to improve the effectiveness of development teams and,
2. adopting a “you build it you run it” delivery model to simplify the delivery organisation.

Download the full study to see the details of the benefits model and see how you might use this as the basis for a business case for your organisation to make these investments.