What Is the People, Process, Technology Framework?

In today's fast-paced digital world, businesses must be agile in order to remain competitive. A People, Process, Technology (PPT) framework examines ways to streamline operations. This process evolved as a result of widespread adoption of CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools and other management software in the 1990s. The increasing availability of these technologies has led to companies adopting them in piecemeal fashion instead of simply using them holistically to improve.

By applying this management framework, you can increase your company's workflow capacity and decrease inefficiencies. You can elevate the effectiveness and efficiency of your team by implementing the right PPT strategy. Explore this useful toolkit for software engineering management to discover how PPT can help your organization.

A Breakdown of the People, Process, Technology Framework

There are four main components to the PPT framework: people, process, technology, and timing. Each has its own set of considerations to take into account.

• People make up the human component of your company. This includes product owners, software engineers, testers, quality assurance, DevOps/SREs, and all other team members involved in software development.
• The process component refers to the activities employees carry out each day in order to accomplish their tasks. As part of these activities, collect feedback, build a backlog, define user stories, define sprint planning, and execute the software development lifecycle.
• Any technology that improves or automates processes encompasses the technology component. Essentially, it is anything that can help you do your job more efficiently. Technology includes equipment such as computers, software, servers, databases, robots, drones, and solutions that provide strategic business insights.
• Timing refers to "at the right time." Many processes and initiatives rely on timing in order to succeed. Timing can be classified into two types: strategic and tactical. An organization's strategic timing involves launching a project, allocating resources, and planning properly. Resource allocation, deadlines, and execution are elements of tactical timing. Timing cannot always be controlled, but it can be managed with sufficient planning and communication. There is often a lack of alignment between people, processes, and technology when it comes to timing. While the framework determines how projects are planned and executed, it does not dictate when they will begin or end. Consequently, aligning all of the components is critical to achieving the desired outcome quickly.

The People, Process, Technology Framework for DevOps

DevOps brings together development and operations to work side by side to ensure that a product meets its goals and deadlines. By definition, DevOps is an application of the People, Process, Technology framework applied to the software engineering organization. By aligning these two teams (People, DevOps enables a continuous cycle of software development, testing, deployment, and maintenance with the help of Process, Technology and Timing. This approach improves your software engineering efficiency and therefore accelerates time to market and reduces the risk of bugs or delays.

DevOps can dramatically increase the speed and quality of product iterations and releases by closely integrating these two functions. By implementing DevOps, organizations can respond more quickly to market demands, helping them stay competitive. By reducing the time it takes for code changes to be deployed, DevOps can also reduce the risk of downtime or other incidents in production environments. CI/CD and agile development practices are made possible by DevOps because it ensures that both development and operations are working in sync at all times.

Furthermore, DevOps allows teams to work more efficiently by reducing their reliance on manual processes such as handoffs between silos. As a result of this streamlined workflow, employees can move from idea to execution and completion more quickly, reducing overall costs and meeting deadlines.

Assessing Your Current People, Process, Technology Environment in DevOps

People are the most important factor in DevOps. A company's culture plays a crucial role in its success, and building a DevOps team without taking into account the way people interact is impossible. Assessing your current people, process, and technology environment in DevOps is the best way to start. By doing this, you can determine where you need to focus your attention and adjust accordingly.

Focusing on People in Your PPT Framework

At the core of DevOps, PPT focuses on people. The organization's culture is its attitude toward customers and employees; people are its employees; and processes are the methods used to deliver value to them.

Ensuring that employees feel empowered to take action is perhaps the most important aspect of this framework. It is unlikely that employees will make decisions if they feel powerless to influence change or have a voice in decisions. Providing employees with information and resources is important for them to feel valued.

A culture of openness and collaboration is also essential for success. The ability to speak up when problems or new ideas for improvement arise can lead to more successful projects. Additionally, open communication breeds trust between all parties involved, which can further enhance the quality of work.

Gauging DevOps Process Effectiveness in the PPT Framework

In DevOps, measuring processes is the most common improvement technique. This step combines measurement and analysis of collected data to determine how a process is performing. It’s usually performed on a regular basis to identify whether there are problems with the process and how it might affect the results.

In order to determine what's working and what isn't, you must collect the right set of data to facilitate process analysis. It may also involve interviewing people about their experiences with the process, taking notes from previous projects, or tracking metrics such as DORA. The next step is to analyze the data you collected. It involves looking at trends, comparing one part of the process to another, or putting it into context by comparing it to other processes or systems. 

Assessing the Technical Sack

There is no one-size-fits-all technology stack for software development. It's important to keep track of the changing landscape and assess your organization's needs as new products and services are released every day.

At a high level, there are three main components of the software development tech stack:

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) management, software development process automation, and continuous integration (CI).

You should also consider the following factors when assessing your overall tech stack:

organizational structure, technical skills and expertise, security budgeting and compliance policies, information-sharing/data-sharing policies, storage/archiving environments, network configuration, quality, scalability, and specific functional and feature requirements.

Despite the fact that each organization's needs are unique, it's important to understand how each component contributes to the overall project and team. You can make informed decisions about which areas are critical for long-term success by understanding the entire stack from top to bottom.

Transforming Your PPT and Organization

The DevOps organization is highly automated and combines the best practices of both software development and operations. To shorten time to market and provide faster feedback, it utilizes a continuous deployment pipeline, along with automated monitoring to detect problems early.

People, Process, and Technology are the three core pillars that make up the DevOps framework, and they must all be integrated in your organization.

Read on to see if you have these pillars in place.

Find the Right Tools to Amplify Your Approach

In DevOps, PPT encourages collaboration and cross-functional teams. The goal of this kind of organization is to bring together people from different disciplines to work on the same project or product. An organization's DevOps framework relies on these tools to amplify people, process, and technology:

• Collaboration is a key component of DevOps culture. It facilitates teamwork by requiring everyone to follow a common set of processes and standards. Consequently, teams can deliver products and services faster and at a lower cost.

• Automation and orchestration are used in DevOps to amplify people, processes, and technology. The use of automation helps reduce manual tasks, while orchestration automates workflows across multiple systems. As a result, errors in processes can be eliminated and efficiency can be increased.

PPT Best Practices for People

Applying best practices in the People, Process, Technology framework can improve one or more aspects of your organization.

An action is something you commit to doing as an individual or team, and then take small steps to accomplish it.

In DevOps, people's best practices might include sprints to incorporate user feedback, or status meetings or stand-ups at the start and end of every workweek to keep everyone informed. In the long run, small changes will have a bigger impact.

People's best practices can be organized into two categories: operational and strategic. You can start an operational best practice right away that will have a direct impact on your organization's day-to-day operations. Developing strategic best practices will help your organization's mission, vision, and goals in the long run. Hybrid best practices fall somewhere in between. A quarterly employee review or employee appreciation days can help improve employee engagement, for example.

Best Practices for Process

In process best practices, actions are taken to design an efficient and effective process. Setting clear goals, creating a framework, and monitoring the effectiveness of the framework with key metrics are some of the steps involved.

The process is the glue that holds people and technology together. Team members must be equipped with the right tools, skills, and methodology to accomplish their tasks. In DevOps, process is characterized by automation, transparency, collaboration, and integration.

The goal of automation is to make your processes as efficient as possible by automating tasks as much as possible. A nightly build process could run automated tests on every commit before merging it into master, for example.

Transparency means that all team members are aware of what is happening at all times. They should be able to see who made which changes to applications and when they were deployed. By doing so, they are able to spot problems earlier and take action more quickly.

In collaboration, everyone works together toward common goals based on a culture of trust. In order to improve processes, they should always share ideas with each other.

Integrating your systems means bringing them all together so they work seamlessly. Make sure your systems use the same APIs or protocols to communicate.

Best Practices for Technology

As part of the PPT framework, technology facilitates people and day-to-day activities in DevOps. Automated monitoring, configuration management, centralized logging, and troubleshooting are just a few of the DevOps principles enabled by technology.

Faster time-to-market and better software development are made possible by technology.

Best practices for DevOps technology include:

• Continuous integration tools: CI tools facilitate the practice of integrating code into the development environment as soon as possible after it has been completed. Continuous integration helps to quickly identify errors in the code and fixes them before they are released to production.
• Automated testing tools: Automated testing is a crucial part of DevOps. It involves running automated tests against software before it's released to production to ensure that it meets the necessary quality standards.
• Automation tools: Automation refers to any action taken by a system that causes it to perform a particular task without human intervention. Automation can be used for all kinds of tasks, from building websites to processing data. As such, automation is an important part of DevOps because it helps developers and operators work more closely together and results in better quality software with fewer bugs.

Utilizing the Best Practices as a Tech Lead

A company's success is driven by its people, process, and technology. You can build a successful team by understanding each of these elements.

Tech leads need people to succeed. In addition to having good decision-making skills, they must also be able to communicate clearly. Furthermore, they should be able to mentor and work well in a team.

It is also important to consider the process. It is crucial for tech leads to understand how tasks are handled while keeping an eye on key metrics. As a result, they can make data-driven decisions more quickly and efficiently.

Last but not least, technology is also important. Tech leads should equip their team members with the right tools to facilitate shorter software development cycles while increasing product quality and efficiency.

Implement People, Process, Technology with Valuable Data Insights

Data-driven organizations track their business's health using metrics. Financial metrics, operational metrics, and customer metrics like revenue, profits, and sales are all included in this category. We’ve identified four engineering dashboards that help software teams to monitor and improve their performance, but we’ve decided to focus on the most tried-and-true one here.

Operational metrics in DevOps has risen in popularity through six years of DevOps Research and Assessment, also referred to as DORA Metrics. 

You can assess and ultimately improve your engineering organization's performance by monitoring the following four key metrics:

• Deployment Frequency (DF): DF measures the daily average number of pull requests deployed to production. This metric helps you monitor your ability to deliver new features.

• Lead Time for Changes (LTC): LTC measures the time elapsed between open to merge pull requests. This allows you to measure how quickly your team responds to changes.

• Change Failure Rate (CFR): CFR measures the ratio of fixed commits over all commits associated with merged pull requests. This allows you to identify if features are pushed too quickly to production, resulting in lower product quality.

• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): MTTR measures the time elapsed between open to closed incidents. This metric can be more or less critical based on service level agreements (SLAs) and can be further drilled-down by priorities based on label categories at a company level. This insight allows you to identify how quickly your team solves incidents.

These metrics, among others, can help you identify People, Process, Technology improvement opportunities as well as scale efficiencies in your organization.

‍Book a demo with us if you would like to have your PPT dashboard set up based on your unique company culture and processes.