Jellyfish

These famous words by renowned management consultant Peter Drucker ring true in several facets of digital era businesses. Particularly in the DevOps arena, the need for IT leaders to measure and monitor the strengths and weaknesses of their teams has become paramount to business success. This is where DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics help IT leaders gain a deeper understanding of their development teams and their most prevalent needs. However, while DORA metrics are powerful in theory, it is often challenging to narrow down to the specific changes needed to transform an organization’s software development and deployment competencies. Moreover, the use of disparate tools and protocols across different IT teams means that the methods for collecting metrics vary vastly within each organization. Lastly, as the metrics are heavily dependent on specific applications, a majority of firms can only leverage DORA for a top-level overview, thereby hindering them from making any impactful changes to boost their development teams’ performance

Bridging this gap and helping businesses gain real value from DORA metrics is Massachusetts-based Jellyfish. The company’s flagship offering is its engineering management platform built to help engineering leaders align their operations with strategic business objectives. With the addition of DevOps Metrics to the Jellyfish platform, the company helps IT leaders seamlessly consolidate metrics from all the software development and deployment tools from across their organizations. This significantly simplifies the delivery of DORA metrics and facilitates greater collaboration between teams—product, engineering, security, IT, and operations—to better achieve business goals.

Bringing Visibility to Complex IT Structures

As an antidote to this problem, Jellyfish launched DevOps Metrics in October 2021. With this release, the company has seen a substantial rise in existing clients wanting to expand their collaboration and add DORA metrics to their platform to better manage their engineering team’s performance. Lau observes, “Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve had numerous instances of clients wanting us to pinpoint the sources of inefficiencies in their software development and deployment workflow.” Lau and his team saw the addition of DORA metrics to the Jellyfish platform as a way to help IT leaders gain an in-depth view of their team’s performance as they cope with the evolving business landscape.

Today, Jellyfish’s platform gathers data across all IT and engineering silos and eliminates the need for developers to traverse multiple dashboards by offering comprehensive integration with popular development, planning, and testing tools.

Breaking Down IT and Engineering Silos

The platform also allows IT leaders to not only apply highly specific performance, efficiency, and lead time metrics to any repo, team, or individual but also enable seamless comparison between different development teams and the impact of their strengths/weaknesses on operations. Once IT leaders see what Jellyfish and DevOps Metrics actually offer, there is always an initial “WOW” moment because historically hard-to-solve IT problems meant expensive third-party consultants and cumbersome spreadsheets.Once IT leaders see what Jellyfish and DevOps Metrics actually offer, there is always an initial “WOW” moment because historically hard-to-solve IT problems meant expensive third-party consultants and cumbersome spreadsheets.

Jellyfish’s Platform Can Be Set Up Quickly Without Disrupting The Existing It Team Workflows And Operational Approaches In The Slightest

From an implementation standpoint, Jellyfish’s platform can be set up quickly without disrupting the existing IT team workflows and operational approaches in the slightest. As a result, IT leaders can simplify the detection of inefficiencies within their software development, testing, and deployment processes, thereby facilitating productivity boosts and more impactful business outcomes. Lau also mentions how the solution helps IT leaders understand the most critical aspects of their high-performing teams and identify the predominant hindrances in their teams’ operations. The ability to precisely narrow down to the teams that need attention and their problems facilitates IT leaders to effectively reprioritize their strategies and resources to flexibly align with real-world disruptions. Another key facet of Jellyfish’s platform is its prowess in supporting software capitalization and tax credit automation, where it aids engineering and IT leaders in holistically understanding the challenges of their teams and mitigating those.

Customer Success through High-Performing IT Operations

Highlighting the impact of Jellyfish’s DevOps platform is a success story where the company assisted a customer with an expanding workforce to effectively manage their hybrid and remote IT and engineering teams.

Initially, as the client’s employees switched to remote working, IT leaders struggled to gain an understanding of the day-to-day issues faced by their teams, which lowered their IT operations alignment with overall business objectives.

"Dora Metrics Can Bring True Value To Software Development Processes, Provided It Leaders Can Diagnose Specific Metrics Without Having To Disrupt The Day-To-Day Operations Of Their Teams"

With Jellyfish, the customer was really able to enhance visibility into their IT operations and workflow, which allowed them to efficiently support their teams in a specialized, data-driven manner that accurately identifies individual causes for inefficiencies and delays.

Similarly, Jellyfish has ignited several other success stories since the launch of DevOps Metrics in its platform. And at the heart of this success is the company’s go-getter work culture and highly innovation-driven workforce, which drives Jellyfish to always be on the lookout for newer ways to improve the rate, performance, and stability of software development, testing, and deployment processes. “How much are we willing to learn, and how much can we actually teach each other? These are important tenets of who we are as Jellyfish. It pushes us to evolve and learn from our customers and the market,” asserts Lau. Lau and his C-suite constantly strive to foster a leadership culture and mindset that is always ready for market fluctuations. With these ideologies driving Jellyfish, the firm aims to become a large, successful, independent software company that changes the way people work by focusing on the team and building the next generation of leaders.

A Future of Better, Safer, and Faster IT Management

Founded in 2017, Jellyfish’s original mission was to support engineering leaders by providing them holistic visibility across their vast teams. The company has since evolved with the changing industry and customer trends to become a trusted partner in the engineering management sector. And with the addition of DevOps DORA Metrics that simplifies the management of software development teams through enhanced visibility and better identification of challenges, Jellyfish continues to build upon its existing track record of success.

Looking ahead, Jellyfish plans to continue developing capabilities that address the prevalent challenges faced by IT and engineering leaders by constantly having its ‘ears to the ground’ with respect to the business goals and market changes. To conclude, Lau reiterates the ethos of his company, “We will continue making DevOps more measurable and actionable for our existing clientele as well as newer businesses that want to effectively gain visibility into their IT and engineering operations while aligning their work with the business goals.”