How Liaoning Mobile Achieved Leading‑Edge DevOps with a Level‑3 Continuous Delivery Assessment

Background

Large enterprises have demonstrated that standardization and tool empowerment are critical to success. The DevOps standards and a standards‑based continuous delivery pipeline platform can markedly improve quality and efficiency, enabling safer, more agile market competitiveness.

On 28 October 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

Liaoning Mobile’s Channel Management System (CMOP) project successfully passed CAICT’s "DevOps Capability Maturity Model" Continuous Delivery Level‑3 assessment, indicating that Liaoning Mobile’s DevOps capability is among the domestic leaders.

Interview with Liaoning Mobile

Q: Please introduce your company and the project you evaluated.

Wang Xin, General Manager of Liaoning Mobile IT Center, explained that Liaoning Mobile, a subsidiary of China Mobile, provides comprehensive digital services in Liaoning, serving over 30 million customers. The CMOP project is a unified portal for channel staff, aiming to build an internet‑based one‑stop office management platform supporting channel information, daily work, and assessment management.

Q: How did you feel after passing the Level‑3 continuous delivery assessment?

Wang Xin expressed gratitude to CAICT for guidance and to the leadership for supporting the DevOps transformation. He highlighted that the assessment marks a milestone in agile and lean IT transformation.

Q: Why did you decide to join the DevOps standard assessment?

Since November 2018, Liaoning Mobile’s DevOps transformation addressed the tension between rapid business demand growth and limited development resources. By adopting Scrum‑based agile processes, building a DevOps toolchain, and implementing continuous integration and deployment, the team achieved faster iteration. The maturity model provided a benchmark, prompting the CMOP project to be used as the assessment case.

Q: What benefits has the assessment brought to your enterprise and team?

IT transformation: Re‑engineered IT production relationships, achieving end‑to‑end flow from business to development to operations, improving overall delivery efficiency by about 30%.

Team building: Shifted from siloed specialist roles to cross‑functional, self‑organizing teams; 80% of engineers are now full‑stack, enhancing personnel reuse.

Management practice: Optimized the DevOps integration system, covering the full software delivery lifecycle and providing a reference for further transformation.

Engineering practice: Introduced automated testing, CI/CD tools, and a unified DevOps platform that links requirement development, quality assurance, and production deployment, supporting agile talent cultivation and organizational agility.

Q: What is your view on the future of DevOps?

Wang Xin believes DevOps breaks down barriers between development and operations, and its ultimate goal is seamless business delivery and stable system operation. He foresees the evolution toward BizDevOps, integrating business considerations into the DevOps pipeline.

Q: Can you share specific metrics that reflect the project’s improvement?

Gao Xuyang noted that after the Level‑3 assessment, the team achieved significant gains across seven continuous delivery capability domains, shortening release cycles and enhancing quality.

Q: What are the technical characteristics of the CMOP system?

The system is deployed via containers on a unified cloud‑native platform, using elastic computing for resource scheduling. With 35‑40 monthly demand deliveries, agile development supports rapid iteration and release.

Q: What challenges did you encounter during the assessment?

Key challenges included lack of a repeatable methodology, talent shortages, learning new tools (e.g., switching from ANT to Maven, SVN to Git, introducing Nexus), and conflicts between DevOps principles and existing IT management policies. Solutions involved external training, adopting container‑based deployments, and establishing separate artifact repositories for test and production.

Q: What is the biggest gain and your next steps?

The biggest gain is the end‑to‑end flow of the CMOP project, enabling efficient delivery and supporting supply‑side reforms. Future plans include replicating the success across the CRM domain, enhancing the DevOps platform’s extensibility, and exploring infrastructure‑as‑code and large‑scale agile collaboration.

Industry Participation Overview

Statistics as of 28 October 2022 show the number of enterprises in the communications sector that have undergone DevOps capability assessments, with China Mobile being a prominent participant.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The "DevOps Capability Maturity Model" series, led by CAICT with contributions from top internet, finance, and telecom companies, is the most comprehensive and authoritative DevOps standard in China. It has been published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading enterprises. The model covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, and system/tool evaluation.

For inquiries about DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT (Liu Kailin) or the Efficient Operations Community (Wei Huanxin).