CI/CD Readiness Assessment
Modern CI/CD environments are often built incrementally. They include open source or in-house built tools added over time, workflows evolving organically, and automation layered on top of manual processes. The result is a pipeline that works, but rarely works optimally. Teams struggle with context switching, duplicated effort, slow feedback loops, and limited visibility into where time and effort are actually being spent.
SPK’s CI/CD Assessment is designed to help organizations step back and clearly understand how software is planned, built, verified, secured, deployed, and operated today, so they can confidently improve how value flows to production tomorrow.
Do I really need DevOps? Ask an Expert and we can help you determine the right path!
Our DevOps Experience
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What makes SPK and Associates different?
Customer Relationships
Typically, our clients choose to collaborate with SPK and Associates for an extended period, often spanning over 8 years.
Regulated Industries
20+ Years of experience with medical device, aerospace, automotive and other regulated industries
Hardware + Software
Uniquely positioned with years of understanding of both hardware and software product development
SPK
ACEs
SPK consistently ensures compliance, quality, and cost-efficiency when accelerating products to market
Our CI/CD Readiness Assessment Services
Learn more about our CI/CD Readiness Assessment Services through this case study.
SPK’s Approach to DevOps
Our experts have worked with automation and software release systems for years, and were leaders in DevOps tool implementations with many of our clients. Our experts will work side-by-side with your engineers to ensure that not only are the tools implemented correctly, but we help train, coordinate and apply improvements to your software release systems for the future. Our goal is to help build the system for your future.
To achieve this, our engagements will normally include at least 3 stages (although all engagements are unique to some extent). These stages are:
- Discovery and Planning
- Installation and Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Integration and Finalization
- Training and/or Managed Services
Discovery and Planning
Our team will work with you to create a DevOps roadmap based upon feedback from your team, stakeholders, and others. This phase includes a review of existing and potential tools. The roadmap that is created will consist of desired outcomes and helping to identify the metrics along the way.
Pilot Program (MVP)
Using existing tools, or trials of potentially new tools, our team will help integrate your business, technical and platform needs into a simple pilot program or minimum viable product (MVP) for testing. This program is meant to learn from. This learning helps drive the rest of the engagement.
DevOps Implementation
In this phase, we accelerated our learning to perform a successful DevOps implementation with analysis, design, coding, and automated deployment can reduce manual steps, minimize the impact of human error, and create time for more innovation. This involves integration of other tools, and creating a final pipeline that is scalable and repeatable.
Training and/or Managed Services
Not only can our team help build your CI/CD pipeline and train you how to manage it moving forward, but we can also help be the bridge for your longer term DevOps strategy by providing on-going managed services in the DevOps release pipeline. Learn more.
What This Assessment Delivers
Our CI/CD Assessment maps your current state across the full DevOps lifecycle and identifies high-impact, achievable improvements aligned to your business objectives.
Specifically, we evaluate:
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The tools and technologies used across your CI/CD pipeline
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The people and teams involved at each stage of delivery
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The processes and handoffs that enable—or slow—progress
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How time is spent across productive work, non-productive work, and idle time
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Where manual steps, waiting, duplication, and lack of visibility introduce friction
This assessment creates the foundation for meaningful workflow optimization—grounded in real data, not assumptions.
A Lifecycle-Driven Approach to CI/CD Improvement
Rather than evaluating tools in isolation, SPK maps your CI/CD environment across the entire DevOps lifecycle:
Plan → Create → Verify → Package → Secure → Deploy → Monitor → Govern
For each stage, we work with your teams to document:
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Current roles and responsibilities
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How work flows today
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Where delays, rework, or context switching occur
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The ideal outcome your teams want to achieve
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Practical opportunities for automation, simplification, and integration
This structured mapping approach ensures improvements in one area don’t create downstream bottlenecks elsewhere.
Cloud Infrastructure Enables DevOps
Because DevOps strategy revolves around people, processese and tools, our teams look to our AWS and Azure experience as a foundation of a new way of working for IT Operations and development teams. In order to form a way to quickly deploy new code, but provide the flexibility of recovery, we believe that cloud technologies are the key component to help solve common challenges such as manual deployments, delays from coding to production, and the lack of communication with all involved.
Contact a DevOps Expert
Do you want to have 200x faster deployments? Do you want to have your deployments go from 10 days to 10 minutes? Our team can help. These are real life outcomes that we get for our clients. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help with your Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery Readiness.
What Our Clients Say
"SPK has been an invaluable partner in transforming our software development process. With SPK's guidance, our team embraced efficient methodologies and cutting-edge tools, significantly improving our development cycle and product quality."
Joshua Talbert
CEO, mysherpas
"Working with SPK feels like working with co-workers in my company, not like interacting with a typical technical support vendor. SPK staff are responsive and partner with me."
Jay DiToro
Director of Systems & Technology, Veranex
"The personalized attention and detailed communication we receive working with SPK and Associates is pretty special. The accessibility of SPK team members is impressive."
Evan Bruck
Director, Active Device Research and Development, BBraun Medical Inc.