A Key Factor Your DevOps is Missing: Process Discovery

The continuous journey of discovery empowers product and development teams to evolve and refine their ideas so that a product can deliver the most value to the business and its customers. Recently, business leaders are focusing on incorporating continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), also known as CICD, into their modernization process to allow developers to test the right things at the right time, quickly experiment, make changes, and adapt as needed to drive innovation throughout the business. Continuous, automated testing is an important component of CICD and can equip businesses with a competitive edge in the market. But the success of testing greatly depends on the best practices adopted in a DevOps culture. One of these best practices is process discovery.

Process discovery is critical to not only standard business updates and changes to the application but also key to fine-tuning modernization testing and deployment – driving the most value from both the application itself and whatever work is being done to modernize it. Process discovery enables visibility across all workflows of an application, allowing organizations to prioritize not only the projects that will drive the biggest benefit to the business but also the testing needed to ensure the new code being deployed is of high quality. A solid DevOps approach with process discovery at the helm combined with smart modernization projects compounds the benefits of productivity improvements, enhanced customer experiences, and faster bottom-line returns.

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Enhancing the customer experience with process discovery

Process discovery makes sure a business’s modernization efforts are focusing on the right things to make a difference to the user. Take the customer service center, for example. The goal of a continuous journey of discovery is to help customer service representatives deliver better customer experiences and be more productive, which can mean cutting down the time it takes a representative to create and/or update a customer profile while a customer waits on the phone. Through process discovery, developers can understand the exact process of how a representative is creating a customer profile (including exceptions) and then identify areas that can be improved, streamlined, or automated to enable the representative to work faster and deliver better customer service. With input from the process discovery effort, automated testing allows development and QA teams to build libraries of standard tests that can be executed at will. With minimal effort, developers can test their own changes much sooner in a development lifecycle. By the time formal QA begins, the majority of development issues have been resolved, resulting in reduced project delivery times and costs.

Through these efforts, developers have the ability to refactor. Refactoring is taking big, monolithic applications and breaking them down into smaller components to modernize more easily, and it enables IT and development teams to be more agile when responding to what the business needs. Refactoring an application provides users with a more streamlined experience. Continuing with the example of creating a customer profile, when the customer care agent enters in a new customer’s information, a refactored application will be able to automatically add that customer’s information to the sales system, the finance system, and the CRM system. Thus, streamlining what used to be three different processes for the agent to now one, resulting in less time and training required.

In order for developers to update applications faster, drive productivity and enhance the customer experience, organizations need to focus on the entire modernization process, including process discovery. It can be easy to overlook process discovery because of its time-consuming nature – but the benefits far outweigh this. Businesses with strong DevOps practices and modernization projects that include process discovery will see the organizational impact on efficiency, productivity, and, ultimately, business outcomes.