Stephen Fontanella

7 February 2023

The business value of frequent deployments: Recouped time

The first post in this series introduced the idea of the different layers of value that your business can gain from frequent deployments and focused on the hard costs you can save. We’re looking at the role the database plays here because it’s the most complicated part of the process and it’s difficult to hit aggressive KPIs and goals when your teams are burdened with process bloat due to mistake-prone, manual work.

It should not be the status quo that developers waste a full day per week reworking a failed release. Once you identify and get rid of inefficiencies and minimize hard costs, your team now has recouped time to them to focus on projects and updates that really matter to your business. That’s what we’re going to address here.

What value-added projects would you like them to focus on? Is there a cloud migration project that your DBAs can now dedicate an extra ten hours a week to? Do your development teams have time to focus on improving the performance of your profit-engine products? Will less hands on keyboards and more attention on feature design lead to more innovation from your development team?

Another area where companies can benefit from recouped time is by increasing employee satisfaction. Employee burnout due to being understaffed or bogged down with repetitive, uninteresting work can lead to employee churn.

The best talent will gravitate toward job openings that get their work into production faster and without a lot of grating, manual steps. Review how long it takes to recruit and onboard replacement developers as well. This lost time can also be regained to help you achieve your long-term goals more quickly.

To determine the business value obtained from recouped time, consider the following questions:

• What are your strategic projects over the next 1-3 years?
• What is the estimated value of those projects to your company?
• What is the value of delivering them earlier than expected vs. on time vs. late?
• If you could wave a magic wand and have developers work on anything, what would that be? How valuable would that project be to your company?
• How long does it take to onboard developers to your database change management process? What is the value of shortening that process so that they implement their work earlier?
• What is your employee churn? How much of that is related to inflexible, frustrating manual processes? How much does that churn cost the business (recruiter + onboarding + empty seat)?

These are big picture questions for your division or business because they’re strategic rather than the tactical hard costs we talked about in part 1.

But this recouped time is still not the greatest provider of value to your business – that would be a faster time to market, which we’ll break down in the third part in this series.

Read the other posts in this series to understand more about how you can understand, plan, and measure an initiative to release the value of frequent deployments:

• Part 1: The business value of frequent deployments: Hard costs
• Part 2: The business value of frequent deployments: Recouped time