Have you ever had to create a software service delivery improvement plan after taking the helm as a department leader? Any tips?

If you’re taking the helm as a department leader, here’s a structured approach that could help you shape the plan:

**Initial Assessment**
To improve software delivery, start by assessing current pipelines, processes, team structure, and tools, while identifying bottlenecks through team input. Define baseline metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, and change failure rate to measure performance. Lastly, gather input from stakeholders to understand expectations and delivery gaps.

**Define Goals and KPIs**
Set clear improvement goals that balance short-term wins and long-term strategies, such as reducing time to market, enhancing code quality, or improving team collaboration. Define measurable KPIs to track progress, aligning them with your goals, like increasing deployment frequency by 25% in the next six months.

**Prioritize Areas for Improvement**
Identify and prioritize key areas for improvement, such as optimizing automated testing and CI/CD pipelines for reliable deployments, streamlining development workflows to reduce friction, enhancing incident management and postmortems for quicker recovery, and addressing technical debt to avoid delivery slowdowns.

** Enable Cross-functional Collaboration**
Promote collaboration across development, QA, and operations teams to foster a DevOps culture and shared responsibility for delivery. Establish regular feedback loops through review sessions and retrospectives to gather insights and support continuous improvement.

**Implement Change Iteratively**
Implement improvements incrementally to test effectiveness and adjust as needed. Invest in training and upskilling the team on new tools, technologies, and methodologies to support the improvement process.

**Track and Iterate**
Regularly monitor progress against KPIs, celebrating wins and recognizing team efforts to maintain morale. Continuously refine the plan based on feedback from metrics, retrospectives, and stakeholder input.

This approach emphasizes understanding the current state, setting measurable goals, and iterating with the team in mind. Have you already identified some key areas of improvement within your department? That could shape what strategies you prioritize first.

Many times, at a team, department, and entire company level.

You may want to first look at formal change management concepts (Kotters 8-Step is a favorite of mine). This can help you chart a course for the group and prepare for the human element of change management.

You should also ensure you have very good clarity on what needs to be improved and what you are being asked to do.  If it's a vague "Make it Better" or "Increase Velocity"work to clarify that first.

Only when you have some clear metrics and rationale do you set a course for your team.

e.g.  We have a defect rate of 50% of all changes have bugs, we need to get it down to 25% by the end of the quarter and down to 15% by the end of the year.  Without decreasing other metrics.

or Deployments take a week to prepare, and 6 hours to complete, we need that down to two days to prepare and 2 hrs to execute by {date}.

Get and Use Clarity

I have and it is a challenge, because sadly even a broken process is utilized. I would strongly recommend truly analyzing the workflows and assess what is truly needed vs what has just been added over time. From there set clear definable goals and outcomes for your key stakeholders. Given you are placing fresh eyes on the situation they are more incline to listen.