Improving CI/CD Velocity

XMO Services

Overview

Large space technology company specializing in manufacturing communication; Earth observation, radar, and on-orbit-servicing satellites; satellite products; and related services.

Challenge

This development-heavy client wanted to provide more centralized services to development teams that were compliant with existing company resources, without reducing the velocity of existing teams.

The client suspected there was a great deal of duplicative work efforts being done by the various teams. ViTL was challenged to streamline the process into consumable “chunks” and to develop an internal CI/CD pipeline-as-a-service.

Additionally, the client did not have hard data on their potential customers or what the customers wanted.

Strategy

The ViTL team approached this as a customer service/service maturity project, with the goal being to help the internal client team do the following:

    • Succinctly describe the product offering(s) they had.
    • Assess the current UX for existing customers.
    • Create a map of new potential customers through the combination of in-person 
      outreach to team leads as well as a comprehensive survey
    • Document current and potential customer needs.
    • Design a repeatable framework that the internal product team could leverage.

Execution

    • ViTL developed documentation strategies and standards that the internal CI/CD team could adopt to describe their product and that defined additional products the company was developing.
    • We performed UX interviews with existing customers in order to gather information on desired capabilities.
    • Developed and deployed a Community of Practice, leveraged the community, and  conducted surveys in order to understand new potential customers and their desires across the organization.
    • Worked within the client’s existing agile planning software and developed a mature  service release model.

Outcome

The client adopted the new service maturity and rollout model developed by the ViTL team, allowing them to expand the use of the CI/CD service offering.