Agile has become one of today's often used methodology in delivering customer experience via enterprise software and services. This presentation gives an overview of why, what and how to leverage enterprise agile practice to deliver superior CX. Though this presentation targets all agile practitioners and enthusiasts, people responsible and driving agile adoption in their organization in different capacities, may find this a useful summary.
4. Application Economy & Digital Transformation
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Application Economy
- Customers hold all the power
- Software is the primary way for customers to experience the brand today
- Competitive pressures to rapidly innovate and iterate applications increased
exponentially
Digital Transformation
- Ultimate Priority - develop & deliver superior customer experiences, enabled by
software
- Launch new applications or services faster than before
- Marry ‘stability’ with ‘agility’/speed – Bimodal IT
“By 2017, 75% of IT organizations will have a bimodal capability,
half will make a mess.” - Gartner (Nov, 2014)
5. ‘Bimodal’ Capability – The Challenges
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Issues within a complex IT infrastructure
• Tracing transaction movement across cloud, mobile and legacy systems to quickly
pinpoint root causes of issues
• Feeding that information back into development systems to improve application
performance at the code level
Silo-ed Monitoring
• Many ‘sources of truth’ – natural offshoot of organisational growth (organic or
through M&A)
• Unifying monitoring and gathering actionable data to improve CX, i.e. promoting
collaboration & rapid response
Technical Debt Cycle
• Suboptimal design decisions > infrastructural fragility & technical debt
• Sacrificing manageability and reliability for innovation and speed
6. Deploy Agile in DevOps Framework
The Benefits:
• Quickly pinpoint and resolve performance issues
• Unify application and infrastructure performance monitoring
• Take a more proactive approach to IT monitoring
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To stay relevant and to succeed in today’s highly competitive &
disruptive application economy, adopting agile is not an option, but
a necessity.
8. Why Rethink the Manifesto
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(1) The world has changed.
(2) Software is now almost omnipresent.
(3) Complexity has increased.
(4) Projects still fail!!
9. Future Gazing
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(1) Data & Science will drive decisions.
(2) Culture will be a focus.
(3) Individual behaviour will be a driver.
(4) Tools will play a larger role.
10. Manifesto: 2016 (2001)
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Individuals &
Interactions
Working Software
Customer
Collaboration
Responding to
Change
Processes & Tools
Comprehensive
Documentation
Contract
Negotiation
Following a Plan
“That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the
items on the left more.”
OVER
COMBINED WITH
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BALANCED WITH
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COMBINED WITH
OVER
COMBINED WITH
11. New Age Product Delivery – Points to Ponder
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Decoupling the Manifesto from agile
Continuing to shift the understanding of failure
Communication Methods
Tracking Metrics & using those to reiterate
Thinking of Agile from organisational perspective
13. CX – the only metric that matters
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To effectively monitor the CX, business services must be analysed
holistically, rather than aggregate of component level performance statistics.
• Most visible brand ambassador
• Most business-critical responsibility of IT for
meeting customer expectation
Software
• Blind Spot – Silo-ed environments + lack of drill-down visibility into 3rd
party component, services, environments
• Operation Bottleneck - Dev & Ops at different pace
• War-room Finger Pointing - Increasing MTTR
• Data Overload - Sheer volume of data from multiple sources
The Challenges of Measuring the Complete CX:
14. CX and ‘Agile Ops’
How can ‘Agile Ops’ help?
• Unifying monitoring of applications
and the infrastructures.
• Bringing disparate data and analytics
together.
• Supporting an agile and continuous
feedback loop.
Benefits of holistic CX
monitoring
• Faster MTTR, reducing issues and
downtime that affects customer
loyalty & revenue.
• Reduction in response time, giving
users a better, faster user experience.
• Improved productivity so that team
can focus on adding value to business.
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16. Enterprise Agile Adoption driven by AWG
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Agile Working Group (AWG) – a real commitment from the org.
- A Scrum team whose product is the
enterprise implementation of Agile.
- Greatly reduces risk, increases the speed
and establishes a sustainable engine for
enterprise transition of Agile.
- Creates an Agile centre of excellence
within the organization.
- A sustainable competitive advantage
combining sophisticated Agile thinking
with a deep understanding of the core
business.
17. Realize DevOps benefits with Agile Operations
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The Development & Operations group work together to:
• Share responsibilities, metrics and goals
• Collaborate, distribute knowledge and learn from
feedback
• Trust in each other, the technology and the process
Overall DevOps adoption shows continued growth, up to 66% in
2015 from 62% in 2014. (RightScale, 2015)
The Philosophy
18. Essentials for Agile Operation
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Scale up & across elastic environments
• Solutions that don’t scale can’t cope in today’s marketplace.
• Elastic environment requires a lot more things to be monitored and what is
monitored is changed frequently.
Improve quality thru collaboration
• It’s not just about bringing data together in a unified view, but about bringing
the data together in a tool to enable group collaboration & continuous
improvement.
• Data served your way, designed based on specific roles and dispersed to the
appropriate staff accordingly.
Speed deployment & Issue resolution
• Issues served in a view that allows to quickly discern bigger, more immediate
problems from those that are less complex and critical.
• Scale the infrastructure on demand to enable developers to make changes in
shorter sprint cycles and more frequent release cycles.
20. Agile Tools
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The marketplace has been inundated with plethora of tools. Open source
movement is adding to the chaos. Choosing horses for the courses requires more
deliberation and effort than before.
Editor's Notes
We are living in a world where connected devices have outnumbered connected humans. Customers will soon interface with more applications than they will with human representatives. This is called the Application Economy: the application interface of the internet of everything.
Every business has become a software business today. New reality - JPMorgan Chase now has more software developers than Google and more technologists than Microsoft.
The consumerization of IT has conditioned users to expect all software to perform flawlessly. A single negative experience broadcast on social
media can go viral and cause exponential, far-reaching damage to a brand.
Digital transformation, DevOps and Bimodal IT have recently gone from “nice to haves” to necessities to survive and thrive in this new world.
Bimodal IT refers to having two modes of IT, each designed to develop and deliver information- and technology-intensive services in its own way. Mode 1
is traditional, emphasizing scalability, efficiency, safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is non-sequential, emphasizing agility and speed.
Issues within a complex IT infrastructure - For many enterprises, decades-old legacy systems and mainframes coexist with virtualized or cloud servers (both on- and off-premises) and as-a-service offerings—creating an intricate maze that Operations must navigate when trying to monitor performance.
Silo-ed Monitoring – As enterprises grow—whether organically or through acquisition—their IT environments often comprise a mix of legacy and modern components assembled over time. And in many cases, each of these components came with or required its own tool for monitoring performance.
Technical Debt Cycle - On the one side, they’re doing everything they can do reduce or eliminate the technical debt’s impact on IT performance and stability; on the other, they’re potentially creating more debt as they react to market uncertainty and customer demands.
Agile Operations supports Bimodal IT. In mode one, it specializes in the deployment, operations and on-going support of digital services and applications created in agile development and continuous delivery environments. In mode two, it emphasizes collaboration with development and test teams by creating an agile feedback loop that shares unified monitoring of the end-user experience and the underlying service-delivery infrastructure.
Quickly pinpoint and resolve performance issues from mobile to mainframe systems—and automatically incorporate this data back into development and testing for increased application quality
Unify application and infrastructure performance monitoring into a single view and prioritize the actions that will most benefit the customer experience, improving overall release velocity
Take a more proactive approach to IT monitoring, reduce the impact of technical debt and adapt quickly to ever-changing business goals
In 2001, when the Agile Manifesto was published, workplace technology looked very different from how it does today. Communication channels were more limited in variety, and sharing of information was nowhere near as easy as it is today with high-speed internet, mobile data and a multitude of cloud storage options. So what does today’s agile look like? Do the values of the Manifesto still apply exactly the same way as they were in 2001?
The Agile Manifesto has been great for software teams, but has presented real challenges for stakeholders involved in the broader context of application development. The problems addressed by agile in 2001 have been magnified by the changing landscape of product delivery:
More information than ever is available, maybe too much
Context, conversations and decisions go undocumented
Communication gaps widen due to geographically dispersed teams
TTM has dramatically shortened
Customer needs continue to go unmet
World has changed - We are radically connected as a result of modern technology. We have invented ways to connect that were unthinkable in 2001 – from online storage in the cloud to social networks. The customer voice is more empowered than ever and customers vociferously share opinions about products all the time.
Technologies of 2001 – Mobile: Ericsson R380 had just been released (the term ‘smartphone’ was being coined), camera phone did not exist. Social: Was evolving from message boards to instant messaging and Wikipedia. Even MySpace wasn’t there. Music: iTunes & 1st gen iPad just came into being. Companies: Google had 400 employees, Amazon made its 1st profit.
Technologies of 2016 – Mobile: Smartphones are now the norm, with more sold worldwide than feature phones. Social: It’s easier than ever to share information and opinions across the world instantly. Music: The iPod still exists but is no longer the force that it was. The music industry is switching to subscription models (such as Spotify) and is integrating with hardware ecosystems built around personal devices and home systems (such as Sonos). Companies: Google is now a global leader and is shifting from just software towards more complex product systems, such as self-driving cars, Google Glass
and smart home systems. Amazon has released Kindles, Fire streaming entertainment devices and more recently entered the mobile phone market.
Software is now almost omnipresent – Banking: According to a report by Accenture, full-service banks in North America could lose 35% of market
share to digital competitors by 2020. Peer-to-peer lending and payments make sending and receiving money easier than ever. Retail solutions including Square and apps such as Venmo and PayPal are connecting customers in constantly evolving ways.
Complexity has increased - Today hardware contains a lot more software. Software products need to consider many more devices and situations, and open source has provided the development community with many more libraries, frameworks and languages from which to choose. A greater number of platforms and browsers must be supported. 81% of teams are distributed (Forrester). The growth in distributed teams also amplifies the organizational challenges of product delivery.
Projects still fail – Why: Teams are out of sync due to disagreement on requirements. We continue to seek out the silver bullets and fail to recognize the nuances of human behaviour and complexity. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions that take place during a product lifecycle. The number of individuals involved–compounded with the complexity of the project are cited primary reasons IT projects fail more frequently than others. And finally, the people matter and sometime they matter over the process.
As software has invaded all areas of business, the speed at which IT teams are expected to develop and deploy new services has increased exponentially—driven by both competitive pressures and a need to “canary test” innovations with fast iterations. Such applications are being built with Agile methodologies that drive demand for faster feedback from IT operations on application and infrastructure performance.
Customers have changed as well. Their expectations for easy-to-use, flawless experiences are higher than they’ve ever been, and when those aren’t met, they don’t hesitate to move onto something new. And they often do so without a complaint, so you may not even be aware of what the issue was—or how you could’ve addressed it.
Blind Spot - In siloed environments, monitoring “blind spots” often exist as transactions move between the various service components. Ops teams do not have drill-down visibility into 3rd party microservices, APIs, XaaS etc.
Operation Bottleneck -
It’s important to remember that change will only occur within your application delivery practices when driven by evolution across people, processes and
technologies. And the best way to ensure that happens is by adopting DevOps methodologies in which both Development and Operations groups have a unified objective of delivering better-quality, higher-performing applications at greater speeds and lower costs to the business.
As organizations realize that the traditional way of doing business is not aligned with today’s market demands, Agile has continued to become a preferred way of breaking the back of the “old way of doing business” and help organizations increase speed and adaptability while maintaining quality.
Because Agile requires change across every facet of the business, the sheer scope and complexity of a comprehensive organizational change can quickly kill forward progress if it’s not handled as a strategic change management effort.
AWG requires a real commitment – a commitment of the type of dedicated, highly qualified resources that an organization would normally place on high profile and risk-intensive projects. Implementing Agile at the enterprise level falls under both these categories so the people you place in this group need to be your A-players in order for the implementation to be successful. Members of the AWG are evangelists. They are true champions of enterprise adoption of Agile and will demonstrate incredible energy and enthusiasm even when faced with a constant stream of negativity and “this will never fly” attitude.
Sizing AWG - an appropriate ratio of AWG member to the rest of the organization is 1:300 (an empirical figure). Just as in any Scrum team, this scales to 7-9 people, it makes sense to split up the AWG into separate teams and ensure the AWGs are aligned at a strategic level so they can independently execute.
What can be expected when implementing an AWG? - The most immediate benefit is speed (of adoption). Although Agile by definition is not a destination and hence never complete, an organization of 1500 people should realistically be able to convert from Waterfall to a consistent, predictable Agile process in 18-24 months. This does not mean the journey is over at this point, but it does mean you should see real, tangible benefits such as reduced cycle times, increased quality and more adaptability.
Another important benefit is consistency across the enterprise. Without a structure in which to implement Agile, creating the type of end-to-end predictability
becomes futile. How can you align teams if they all utilize different variations of Scrum? Etc etc. Having a defined, common Agile language for your organization helps alleviate these problems.
The most compelling reason for having an AWG is accountability.
When organizations realize that the status quo is simply not an option and enterprise change is needed to meet the demands of an altered business landscape, an AWG can greatly increase the speed and probability of success and serve as a positive driver towards enterprise adoption.
CSF’s:
Keep executive support highly visible
Full time commitment
Demonstrate Progress Constantly; Benchmark Agility
Sizing the AWG appropriately
While DevOps is a methodology that can support new application delivery paradigms, achieving Agile Operations requires new thinking, processes and tools in performance monitoring.
Scale up & across – As applications are built on newer microservice architectures, deep visibility is becoming increasingly important. Among the millions of bytes of data that can be monitored, you want the most important, action-oriented information to bubble to the top, so that you can be responsive to customer concerns. And when an application evolves, you want a monitoring solution that can keep pace.
Right agile solution allows to scale effortlessly and continuously monitor how business critical applications and global networks are performing for end users.
Quality thru collaboration - At the onset of an issue, it can be difficult to identify the culprit with traditional, fragmented monitoring. Plus, the constant finger pointing can create more friction among an already divided staff. When something goes awry, different individual may want to look at something different, but by sharing their findings, they can collaborate toward the unified goal of rapid response. This feedback loops also helps to drive improvements
and remove problems before an application goes into production.
Speed deployment & Issue resolution -
