In this slide deck, West Corporation explores how to overcome Conway's law through agile engineering for successful digital transformation

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Overcoming Conway’s Law Through Agile Engineering
For a Successful Digital Transformation
Gautham Pallapa
West Corporation
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gpallapa
gpallapa at west dot com
@gpallapa

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We connect. We deliver.
West Corporation at a Glance
Market-leader with 30 years
of experience,
driving cloud-based
communication solutions for a
connected customer
experience
5BTexts, voice alerts,
emails and
notifications
65BVoice minutes
annually
162MConference calls
annually
305M911 calls per year

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We connect. We deliver.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/ya6db7so

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We connect. We deliver.
From a Monolithic Architecture

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We connect. We deliver.
To a Cloud Native Architecture

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We connect. We deliver.
1
Murphy’s Law
Anything that can go wrong
will go wrong
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Moore’s Law
Computing power doubles
every 18 – 24 months
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Conway’s Law
Organizations design
systems which copy the
organization
4
Brook’s Law
Adding more people to a
late project makes it later
5
Goodhart’s Law
When a measure
becomes a target, it
ceases to become a good
measure
6
Metcalf’s Law
The more devices
connected to a network,
the more useful it becomes

8. Story 1
Story 2
Story 3
Microservices
Experimentation around team
structures to reflect the software
they are to build
Agile Transformation
Transforming a waterfall
organization to adopt team agility
Introducing DevOps
Building on the momentum of an
Agile team

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We connect. We deliver.
1
2
3
4
5
WaterfallOrganizational Silos
Command and Control Structure
BA
UI/UX
Dev
QA
Ops
Requirements
Design
Development
Testing and Validation
Maintenance

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We connect. We deliver.
Software Development in a Waterfall organization
Source: https://tinyurl.com/yd95fjht

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STORY 1
Agile Transformation
Introducing Team Agility
Radical experiments to break
traditional waterfall methodology
and demonstrate the power of
agility

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Agile and Lean

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Agile Engineering

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Agile Engineering

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0
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0
3
0
4
Sharing
Automation
Culture Metrics

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Build – Measure – Learn

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Within Each Experiment
Time Box Time Box

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We connect. We deliver.
Identify the Right Intrapreneurs
Agile Engineering

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Experiment
Hypothesis:
Having a team aggressively work on a problem that is unrelated to the team’s focus makes them
form, storm and norm, and that momentum can be used to drive throughput up by at least 15%
Sprint Zero

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We connect. We deliver.
Sprint Zero
CONTINUOUS
EXPERIMENTATI
ON2 Week Iterations
Working Prototype in 8 days
• 1 patent filed within 2.5 weeks
• 3 additional updates within next iteration
3 Engineers
• Form – Storm – Norm within 1 iteration
• 7 experiments in 10 days

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We connect. We deliver.
STORY 2
Introducing DevOps
Building upon Team Agility
Harnessing the momentum
gained by the team to overcome
inertia

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We connect. We deliver.
Progressive Elaboration
Opportunistic approach
to introducing DevOps
Strategic Disruption

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We connect. We deliver.
2 production sites in 18 daysRelease Pipeline in 6 daysDev Env in 12 days
This team broke every single record in each phase
Previous team had failed for 8 months and then handed
it over to us
Operational Automation FTW!Agile Engineering
1 Product Owner
1 Resource Manager
3 Engineers
CI/CD

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We connect. We deliver.

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We connect. We deliver.
STORY 3
MicroServices
Using design patterns
Structuring the team around
design patterns that they have to
adopt (Conway’s Law)

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We connect. We deliver.
12 Factor Applications

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Mise en place – Everything in its place

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We connect. We deliver.
Cloud Native Stack

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First Annual Pi Day Hackathon

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First Annual Pi Day Hackathon
• March 12 – 14
• 48 hours of intense coding
• 26 teams
• Open to anyone at West
• Show off skills, bold ideas
• Demonstrate
o Collaboration, Execution, Innovation

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My Belief: Strategic Disruption Leads to Progress

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We connect. We deliver.
WSO2
Methodology
for Agility

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We connect. We deliver.
Current Experiment:
Microservices Team

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We connect. We deliver.
Thank you!