AGILE IN IT SERVICES

Srinath Chandrasekharan, CSMSenior Manager - Consulting HCL Technologies

AGENDA The IT Landscape The Challenges Our Approach Learning's

THE IT LANDSCAPE

HCL $ 6.2 Billion Spread Across 31 countries Multiple Domains Service mix includes

BPOEngineering services and R & DEnterprise Applications Infrastructure ServicesCustom Applications

1 Lakh + employees

1000 + active

projects

OTHER LARGE IT COMPANIES IN INDIA….. Other large IT players

InfosysTCSWiproCTS + many medium and small companies…

Most projects won through competitive bidding.. Margin’s play a major role….

ABOUT A DECADE BACK… CMMI was a USP

as customers looked for predictable, repeatable process.

Spread across domains and technologies, this was a task huge task…

All companies aspired for various levels… …. 5 was great, lower ones were acceptable…

Heavy documentation needed lot of checks… Documentation became the focus and evidence

was largely document based… compliance to processes became the focus instead of innovation

ORGANIZATION STRUCTURES… Were more ‘Command and Control’….

following the rule was common … deviations needed to be ‘approved’…..QA

group was the gatekeeper specialization was considered good in processes, technologies, domains… creating smaller , specialized groups within

the large organizations…..led to creation of silos

RESULTING IN THIS

WHEREAS THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE HELPFUL

THE CHALLENGES

WHAT AGILE MEANT….

WITH UNDERSTANDING AGILE For many client’s going agile means…..

Not giving the requirement in full, yet expecting a functionally working feature….

Changing the requirements within sprints.. Not having to commit to the teams in terms

of time…..Getting changes implemented was inbuilt

into Agile framework and thus avoided heavy and bureaucratic

WITH FIXED PRICE CONTRACTS…

WITH FIXED PRICE CONTRACTS… Estimation became a problem..

How do you estimate when you don’t know what to develop…. Yet you need this for winning the bid…..

No industry published data to fall back on… SP are relative and many people don’t understand it…

WITH EXECUTING AGILE PROJECTS What’s the best methodology…

People used to spoon feeding…Every step and outcome listed in CMMI…but

Agile prescribes an open culture ……What’s Scrum ? DSM ? Reviews? Sprints ?Should I have a standard Agile process

across all projects ? If yes, is it Agile ? If not, how do I compare?

METRICS Some clients don’t care about them…

So do we ask the teams not to waste time on them and use it more productively ?

Even if we collected for the other projects nothing can be analyzed for a comparison

No baseline report… Can’t get data for RFP’sCan’t compare which methodology will

provide better results…..

OUR APPROACH

HOW WE GOT ESTABLISHED Formed CoE

All got trained on CSMCreated some process material around Agile

(predominantly Scrum)Created training material similar to CSMAssessed / worked with projects

implementing scrumStudied other Agile methods and created

processes, so as to increase our basket of offerings….

Forums for addressing questions..CoP

ADDRESSING CLIENT EXPECTATIONS Started getting involved right from the

RFP stage… so as to understand clients maturity and expectations from Agile.. And if needed correct them…

Assessed projects for applicability of Agile

Training for client business / IT teams Session for sales team….very

important.. Sessions for Senior Management…. Self learning modules on the Learning

Management System….

ADDRESSING ESTIMATION Gathered experiences from different

projects on FPP Evolved a guideline on fixed price

contracts for Agile Educated Senior Management

HOWEVER ……. This is still something we

are grappling with…

ADDRESSING EXECUTION.. THROUGH FRAMEWORK Created a structured process around

Scrum and some XP practices Structured training program Leveraged existing QA group to

continuously check projects for consistent implementation and regular feedback

Getting involved with teams for 2-3 sprints

Focused sessions with teams on estimation, story writing etc.

ADDRESSING METRICS Made a set of metrics as core, ensured

that these are gathered by all teams for every sprint…

Published a report which said how are projects doing.. Without comparing them

Used CSAT as a common measure, across Agile and Non-Agile projects as well.

Collected qualitative data (team stress, weekend working, client pressure, etc.) to support the other data.

WE LEARNT MANY THINGS THE HARD

WAY….. SOME LEARNING'S…

WHAT WOULD WE HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY…. KEY LEARNING'S Proactively take Senior Management

along at all times. Agile should be well thought out instead of being knee- jerk CoE was focused a lot on projects and

delivery teams, left senior management interaction to project teams.

Sales teams / senior management involvement was as and when needed, so there was no single approach to Agile.

Cultural change needed was slow to take off.

WHAT WOULD WE HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY…. KEY LEARNING'S Top-down and bottom-up working

togetherWhile teams were becoming Agile,

management was not.Metrics from traditional methodologies were

still expected from teams, resulting in pressure on teams.

Support for teams was problematic, in many areas.

WHAT WOULD WE HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY…. KEY LEARNING'S Get a delivery sponsor who can speak

for you at various forums Important to spread awareness and

intricacies of Agile.Get buy in from delivery teams for activities

done by CoE and not be seen as an ‘outsider’.

WHAT WOULD WE HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY…. KEY LEARNING'S Focus on tooling and skills ….along with

processesWhile Scrum was becoming popular, XP

practices were largely ignored.Some practices were questioned for cost

effectiveness (Pair Programing, TDD).Leveraging projects experience was not well

established.

THANK YOUc.srinath@hcl.comSrinath_cs@yahoo.com