Am I relevant IT support story tale
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Monty, the head of the maintenance and support team at a large bank, received an email from the CIO questioning the value provided by Monty's 70-person team over the past year. The CIO asked Monty to provide examples of business value added by the team and to develop a plan to make the team more relevant and contemporary. Maintenance teams often struggle with long cycle times, difficulty deploying releases, and using different processes across product lines. Consultants recommended adopting agile practices, but iterations may not help teams that work on the most urgent issues daily with frequently changing priorities and uncertain fix times. Monty's plan should focus on training, enabling the team with a customer focus, implementing lean processes like value
Am I relevant IT support story tale
- 1. Am I relevant PRASAD_PRABHAKARAN@INFOSYS.COM TWEET – PRAS_INDIA Whatever getting discussed here is not necessary Infosys point of views
- 2. Agenda Context Known challenges in Support / Maintenance Why its common ? What should we do Lean / Agile.. The way forward ..
- 3. Help me.. Bonty, Head of M&S team of a large Bank got a ‘mail’ from his CIO “ There are 70 plus FTEs in your team, I know you guys work hard, but I am not seeing any value from this team since an year. Can you please bring out specific instants where there is business value add from your team. If you are not able to find any, I want you to introspect and come out with a plan for you and team to be relevant and contemporary in the new IT eco system. Let me know what help you need from me” Why this mail? What are the reasons?
- 4. How Monty’s team look like A separate team that is not a part of the main application development Primary responsibility is to support issues after application is deployed and is live Teams with high Maintenance Load and ad-hoc tasks Analyze and fix defects that comes from software that has already been deployed in production. Release tested/integrated software with defects fixes as per business needs and on the priority of the defects.
- 5. All fingers point to Monty Huge cycle time between a issue reported and usable software. Struggle to deploy software into production and it is tense weekends. One-liner change takes weeks to release it on the production. Have multiple product lines and all use different process and tools – why blame me..
- 6. Why this phenomenon so common?
- 7. How can we help Monty
- 8. Consultants told Agile but.. Iterations/Sprints don’t help as teams work on whatever is most urgent for the day. Priorities change quite frequently, sometimes daily that makes it difficult to plan for a 2-3 weeks of work. Uncertainty on how long will it take for the Bug/defect to be fixed makes it difficult to estimate the work items Difficult to plan for future releases as release are generally based on dynamic business criticality and SLA.
- 9. What should be Monty’s 30-60-90 days plan •Training •Enablement •Customer and value focus – whoever is consuming our code/ service is your customer •Value stream mapping •Lean/Agile based Adaptive Maintenance Framework •Goals / KPIs People Organization change management •Realigned org structure •Communication and collaboration management •Program management and governance – baseline and define road map Process Technology •Continuous Delivery Eco system •Power tools •Application life cycle management
- 10. Lean/Agile based Adaptive Maintenance Framework Lean Principles • • • • • • Value Value Stream Flow Pull Continuous Improvement Respect for People Kanban process • • • • • Visualize Workflow Limit Work-in-Progress Manage Flow Make Process Policies Explicit Improve Collaboratively Scrum framework • • • • Cadences Artifacts Ceremonies Roles Adaptive Framework • • • • • Flexible Cadences Visualization Prioritization Effective and Efficient Sustainable
- 11. Advantages of Agile/Lean based Adaptive Maintenance Framework Support for Just-In-Time Planning and execution Promotes constant flow of work Reduces time devoted of planning & estimating Have less process overhead Predictable lead times based on WIP(Work in progress) limits Flexibility to react to continuous changing priorities of work items Effective feedback mechanism Lesser Idle Capacity Higher predictability Increased Morale Efficient prioritization process Improved flow efficiency
- 12. Components of Adaptive Maintenance Framework Process Metrics Engineering Practices Defining Process Metrics Implementing Engineering practices like CI, Build and test Automation for faster delivery. Usage of integrated ALM for visibility Explicit Policies Defining explicit Policies on Class of Services and Work flow steps Class of Services Visualized Workflows Class of Services for handling different work types and priority Workflows Visualized and limits applied to process steps Flexible Cadences Different cadence for planning, release and retrospective
- 13. Further readings