AGILE SHOWCASE
SD Times
August 2019
The new age of Agile:
Evolving from teams
BY DEAN LEFFINGWELL n his book, “From Project to Product,” author Mik Kersten describes how business leaders are illequipped to solve the problems posed by digital transformation. He points to the 2018 report, Corporate Longevity Forecast, which issues a “gale force warning to leaders: at the current churn rate, about half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced over the next 10 years.” It’s a grim cautioning, but not surprising given the new paradigm of competition where customers no longer just compare you to your direct competitors but to the best service they have ever received—from any company. If you
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Dean Leffingwell is the creator of SAFe and cofounder of Scaled Agile, Inc.
launch a banking franchise, you’re not just compared to Chase and Wells Fargo, your user experience is measured against Uber and Amazon. That’s a tall order to fill. And it’s one of the many reasons why every business that wants to survive the storm must become like FedEx, which venture capitalist Marc Andreessen describes as “a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached.” Kersten claims — and there’s every reason to agree with him — that “... those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century.” The most forward-looking companies are actively future-proofing for this. BMW Group’s CEO expects that in their future, more than half of the staff
will be software developers. Okay, we get it — hire thousands of software developers. But is that enough? What does it actually mean to master large-scale software delivery? Based on what’s happening in the field, we’re understanding that it takes a great deal more.
Business agility: the next big move From an IT perspective, Agile with a capital “A” has served us well. Development teams get it, they usually like it, and when practiced with integrity and commitment, it consistently delivers results like faster time-to-market, improved quality, predictability, and employee engagement. Agile provides a great foundation, for sure, especially when combined with Lean, DevOps,
August 2019
SD Times
AGILE SHOWCASE
to the entire business if you look at companies that are leading the way in this area, you’ll see a pattern in approach and capabilities: n From C-level to marketing and HR — everyone adopts Agile
Let’s start with the idea of enterprisewide practice of Lean, Agile, and DevOps. When every team from every unit — leadership, sales, development, marketing, HR, finance, etc. — works from the same playbook, all have their eyes on the same prize, and work together in cadence and alignment, the entire organization — not just development — is able to continually and proactively deliver high-quality value faster than the competition. Working this way is an emerging trend and requires specialization of principles and practices for the context of the business unit. For instance, you wouldn’t expect marketing and development teams to follow the exact same practices, but there would be strong similarities. and Lean Portfolio Management. And now, companies are experimenting with extending Agile beyond its IT roots and applying it to the whole business. The idea of business agility is clearly catching fire but interpretations of what it is and how to achieve it vary. The underlying meaning, though, is something on which we can probably all agree: business agility is a competitive advantage that helps an enterprise adapt and thrive in the digital age by delivering innovative technical and business solutions in the shortest sustainable lead time.
Key ingredients for achieving business agility Many organizations struggle to get beyond team-level Agile because they can’t agree on the roadmap. However,
n Build core capabilities
Industry pacesetters are building advanced capabilities in the areas of team and technical agility, DevOps and release on-demand, Lean-Agile leadership, Lean systems engineering, and Lean Portfolio Management. Mastering these capabilities creates muscle memory that can go far in bolstering the development and delivery machine, but even that is not enough to avoid being sidelined by faster and more nimble competitors. n Add organizational agility
Organizational agility provides the business with the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than its rivals. This is achieved by being able to rapidly evolve strategy, organizational structures, technical and business practices, and people operations. Build-
ing organizational agility helps deliver the tangible benefits of better financial results and is an essential chapter in the playbook for achieving business agility. n Commit to a continuous
learning culture
Creating a learning-centered work culture is critical for attracting top talent and giving your workers the tools they need to be successful and grow your business. Seems logical, but it’s far too easy to sacrifice learning and development in favor of short-term wins, and it’s not unusual for an organization to view training as a one-off exercise to fill an immediate need. This is a common cry among many of the enterprises I’ve worked with who wonder why they struggle to sustain their early wins from ‘going Agile.’ Their counterparts, however—the organizations fully committed to building a continuous learning culture—are seeing something altogether different. When an organization commits to encouraging individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation, results can be dramatic. Deloitte reports that companies with continuous learning cultures enjoy a number of benefits, including: n They are 46% more likely
to be first to market n They experience
37% higher productivity n They are 92% more likely to innovate
The implications are clear: business agility — and all that is required to achieve it — is a game-changing approach to business, with significant bottom-line implications that should go far in helping businesses survive and thrive in the 21st century. z
Force Multiplier: \fo(e)rs \mƏl-tƏ-pl ḹ(Ə)r n: A tool that dramatically amplifies your effectiveness.
73% of customer-facing apps are highly dependent on the mainframe. Yet 2 out of 3 lost mainframe positions remain unfilled, putting quality, velocity and efficiency at risk. You need Compuware Topaz as your Force Multiplier to: • Build and deploy with agility • Understand complex applications and data • Drive continuous, automated testing Learn more at compuware.com/force-multiplier compuware.com | @compuware | linkedin.com/company/compuware
The Mainframe Software Partner For The Next 50 Years
August 2019
SD Times
AGILE SHOWCASE
Modernize mainframe apps through Agile practices gile software development is well understood, and the benefits are clear. In the world of software development for mainframes, the benefits are there but there has been some resistance to adopting Agile practices. “There’s not necessarily a resistance to do it, but where the resistance comes in is they don’t have the supporting infrastructure to allow them to do that,” explained David Rizzo, vice president of product development at Compuware, adding that if organizations running mainframes don’t have tools and processes in place for Agile development — and many don’t — their paths to faster software delivery and the ability to move quickly on business opportunities or to remediate issues will be more difficult. “That’s one of the big issues we see, is that if they’re using outdated tools and outdated process to delivery, they don’t see how they can move faster because they don’t have a means to do it.” Mainframes have traditionally been used in industries that are highly regulated, such as finance, insurance, health care and more. But even those organizations are looking to modernize their applications, and are learning that new techniques and new architectures can be applied to a world of COBOL and green-screen applications. Developers today are creating applications for web browsers, mobile devices, tablets, desktops and the cloud. Mainframes, then, are just another endpoint to target — one that comes with the reliability and security that large organizations have come to rely on. According to Rizzo, when you look at the development tooling in the market, the mainframe has become mainstream as far as the available technologies that interact with it.
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“From a coding languages perspective, on the mainframe it’s predominantly COBOL, and it’s just another language. I talked to people that are entering the industry, coming out of colleges and universities, they’ve learned seven, 10 different languages in the time they were in school and putting COBOL in front of them is just learning another syntax, another instruction set, so to speak, that they have to work with. Using things like Jenkins, It’s just standard in the toolkit for developers in large enterprises, and connecting to the mainframe is just another platform.” Compuware provides the tools that help organizations modernize their legacy applications. Topaz is Compuware’s IDE for modern development, based on the Eclipse Java IDE. Topaz for Total Test is a tool for automated unit testing on the mainframe. And last year, Compuware launched zAdvisor, an analysis tool for measuring how well the team is performing. “We look at developers as high-performing athletes,” Rizzo said. “You always want to know what they’re doing right, and how they can be better. The zAdviser product gives them some insight into that so they can help them to continually improve.” The metrics collected in zAdvisor can quantify quality, velocity and efficiency by looking at such things as how much work development teams are putting into the system, how many stories are getting done in a sprint, how many unit tests they’re creating and how many automated scripts are created and executed during a given cycle. For instance, Rizzo explained, if you
have more automated tests, and you’re running them more frequently, your quality will improve, and you can draw that conclusion from other metrics that go with that, like how many bugs were created, how many were fixed, and what are you doing to keep that in check. The zAdvisor tool also gives a view into source code changes, such as how many elements are changing and how many are being deployed. “You can get a sense of the impact that that will have when you want to move to production,” he said. “As the old saying goes, if you don’t measure it you can’t
The mainframe has become mainstream as far as the available technologies that interact with it. —David Rizzo
improve it. So, if your start measuring it you start naturally improving it and seeing ways for it to go better.” Agile and DevOps processes are designed to make delivering software faster and more efficiently, while maintaining the highest levels of quality possible. It’s also about using your resources to deliver as many new features or defect fixes as quickly as you can. Compuware is leading the way in helping organizations running mainframes modernize their applications through modern work methodologies, tools and processes. “Companies are continuing to do Agile,” Rizzo said. “Those that have embraced it, and those that haven’t, are realizing that they need to implement something that will allow them to increase the cadence of their delivery while ensuring they deliver something that is meaningful and valuable to their end users or customers.” n
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August 2019
SD Times
AGILE SHOWCASE
Becoming agile in the knowledge economy ow do organizations effectively identify, plan and sequence work across the whole enterprise and across product portfolios, especially in the knowledge economy and new way of working? And how do you then have proper management and governance of that? These questions are top of mind in an Agile world and questions Rally Software from Broadcom are helping organizations find answers to via its application life cycle management (ALM) platform. Christopher Pola, executive advisor at Rally, says, “So you’re abiding by the principles of product flow and lean, agile enterprise because the reason why people aren’t getting benefits is they’re still managing the work and the people in a very traditional way. An example of that mindset is efficiency: We value efficiency foremost, right? That means everyone has to be working 100 percent. But when dealing with the knowledge economy and the front line, workers have more knowledge than their management, and there’s so much variability, nothing homogenous in terms of tasks, nothing’s repetitive. Capacity, efficiency, and utilization is a very bad metric to run your organization on.” Enterprises need to think differently in terms of whether it manages the people, process and technology, or the people’s scope and time. It needs to allow for variability, cycle time, and innovation. Then those changes need to be brought into both planning and execution. Laureen Knutsen, executive advisor and head of solution architects at Rally, describes an example of an actual customer: “They mentioned that they were doing resource utilization and the resource utilization people were very proud of themselves because they said they had 100 percent utilization. I
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asked them how they’d done that. They said, ‘We keep track of every project. We had somebody come up to us and tell us that they finished with a project, not just a task, a project, two hours early. So we gave them a two-hour task to fill their time so they were 100 percent utilized. I asked them if anyone had told them again that they were done early, and they hadn’t.” That organization was making people less productive by trying to be 100 percent utilized at a consolidated level. The organization had a few thousand people on its team and it was trying to manage 100 percent of everyone’s time. That’s vintage resource management and an upper level of process that needs to change so the team can actually get to true productivity and predictability within itself. Changing that methodology entails getting down to the fundamentals of where adverse practices first started. Knutsen says that at first you’re guessing and placing bets when you’re strategizing. Then you need to let the teams estimate the work and tell you what they can really get done and have your teams work on becoming extremely predictable. Not just at the team level. When the teams become extremely predictable your projects will end up becoming more predictable. Your people will get very productive in that type of environment. Rally visualizes everything from strategy all the way through execution. There are many types of business levels that you can tie to that top-tier strategy regardless of how long that’s going to take you to complete the strategy. You can tie it all the way down to the two-week iterations. Like breaking it down through whatever
steps the company normally takes. Another challenge that needs to be overcome is that often the people doing the planning are not the people doing the work. Pola says, “First, this is all bad in a knowledge economy because your knowledge workers are the ones that have the skills. So we do that, we put the plans in place. When we manage to go to plan, then any variance from that plan, even if there’s value in changing the plan, we deem to be bad.” The result is managers manipulating spreadsheets to show a good report. Pola adds, “People don’t have the data right.
When dealing with the knowledge economy and the front line, workers have more knowledge than their management. —Christopher Pola
They’re manipulating the data to run their businesses, and it’s not accurate. It’s not what I like to think of, which is a principle beyond budgeting. It’s an open and ethical information system that provides one truth across the organization.” For Knutsen it’s evolutionary, continuous improvement, constant change, constant striving to get better at an individual level, a team level, a team of teams level, and a leadership level. She says, “It’s really hard to fail at that point as opposed to companies that are continuing to do it as they’ve always done because that’s all they’ve always done.” Pola believes the biggest improvements will come when decentralized decision-making becomes the norm because fundamentally it will help companies realize exponential improvement in cost optimization, innovation and make for happier people. n