Agile operational development for an internal IT service provider in a large enterprise
Agile operational development for an internal IT service provider in a large enterprise
Industry: Energy/IT
Objectives, executive summary
The project aims to establish, develop and support the more agile and efficient operation of the internal IT service provider of a group of more than 40 companies. The service provider's task is to assess and understand the IT needs of the member companies, implement the related improvements and operate the IT systems. Due to the highly hierarchical and bounded nature of the organisation, the introduction of agile elements was limited, but by building an internal agile team, categorising projects, optimising processes, implementing organisational and cultural development actions, streamlining IT tools and introducing new roles, member satisfaction and process efficiency increased and lead times decreased.
Client background and environment
The project aims to establish, develop and support the more agile and efficient operation of the internal IT service provider of a group of more than 40 companies. The service provider's task is to assess and understand the IT needs of the member companies, implement the related improvements and operate the IT systems. The organisation's previous practice was to implement the improvements using business analysts and temporary project teams, which often caused problems with resource allocation and delivery times. Member satisfaction surveys had not been carried out in the past and there was little or no knowledge of Agile among the staff.
Objectives, tasks
Development of an internal IT service provider for a group of energy companies, agile operational development, faster responsiveness and increased customer satisfaction. The highly hierarchical and fixed framework of the organisation did not allow for a full agile transformation, so the client side did not aim for an agile transformation of the organisation, but rather to put agile approaches and tools into practice. As the goals were initially defined at the top level in a difficult to measure way, it was also a task to concretise the goal system, which was achieved by subdividing the top-level goals into annual/quarterly OKR-based sub-goals. The resulting and evolving development roadmap included the organisational and operational development elements that supported the achievement of the objectives and thus progress and results could be measured.
Challenges, difficulties
The challenge was the highly hierarchical and in many cases over-regulated structure of the organisation and the dependency on the parent company, which was also felt in the implementation of strategy and day-to-day operational tasks. In addition, there were several client-side personnel changes, which led to several changes in objectives, and the organisational culture, which posed challenges in terms of the application and implementation of agile principles and approach. The aforementioned parent company dependencies meant that the organisation was not able to fully integrate all projects into a single prioritisation methodology, and the 'this development must be started immediately, everything is important' approach remained.
Implementation of the task
As a first step of the organisational development tasks, the organisational operation was assessed by means of interviews and questionnaires to determine the satisfaction of internal IT service providers' staff and customers, as well as the range of problems they encountered.
Based on these problems, a problem map was identified, including the root causes. Based on the root causes and their impact, a prioritised development list (organisational development backlog) and a roadmap were developed. To implement the improvements, a cross-functional Agile operations development team consisting of ProMan Consulting and client-side experts was formed. Given the lack of Agile operations experience of the Client side colleagues, the focus was on the development of the team's functioning in addition to the launch of the development. This included Agile training, Scrum Mastery and the development of the team's Way of Working (WoW).
The agile team that was formed implemented the development tasks based on the established roadmap and backlog, with continuous change management (new emerging development focuses and constantly changing priorities). The results of the organisational development were presented to the organisational stakeholders on a bi-weekly basis and the feedback received was taken into account in the sprint and release planning and the content was continuously fine-tuned.
The organisational and operational development included areas such as:
Optimising the organisational project and portfolio management process - An agile and traditional project process, a system of categories for projects, a value set of their main characteristics, the development of a demand management process, a prioritisation scheme for both agile and traditional projects, and the fine-tuning of roles and process efficiency through value stream tools were developed. The prioritisation scheme and the way projects are selected on a quarterly basis were fine-tuned and finalised after a pilot period. Following the development of the processes, an IT system specification was prepared, along which a selected IT solution was implemented and piloted for a category of projects. Agile project collaboration was piloted through 2 projects.
Measuring and increasing customer satisfaction - As customer satisfaction was previously only measured through qualitative tools and interviews, an NPS-based quantitative questionnaire was developed and more than 1,000 people participated. The results were validated through interviews with the managers of the member companies and specialisations. Based on the baseline, annual and semi-annual quantified targets were established and the impact of each organisational development action was regularly measured back, so that the impact of each development on customer satisfaction was known and transparent.
IT KAM system - Also closely linked to the above area, an IT KAM system has been set up, under which IT has delegated internal IT consultants directly to member companies. By developing their tasks and working methods, the "siloed" nature of the needs assignment and demand management process has been reduced, the efficiency of the process has increased and the average lead time has been reduced.
Task Force - A Task Force team and a related process were established to enable high-priority and urgent projects to be delivered flexibly, with high levels of authority, directly to senior management, and with lead times that were orders of magnitude shorter than the core organisational process.
Organisational culture development - An organisational culture development roadmap was developed, which included quarterly elements to be developed, such as: improving meeting culture (timing, format, preparation, facilitation tools, goals and agenda, principles), increasing process and work transparency, strengthening cross-functional collaboration, weakening silos, strengthening supportive leadership through executive coaching tools, strengthening knowledge sharing within and between departments. Some of the culture development elements were implemented using the client's own capacity, others were implemented with the help of experts from ProMan Consulting.
Results
- As a result of the development, we consider it a success that an agile team has been formed on the client side, which, in addition to the methodological elements, has also fully mastered the agile approach, and has developed its daily operations on Kanban and Scrum principles, with continuous improvement along the agile principles.
- At the organisational level, the project, portfolio and demand management processes have become more efficient, known and accepted by all, and the number of IT support tools, which had previously been almost 15, has been reduced to 5 with the introduction of a new system and minimal development, making the work of the client-side colleagues easier, faster and more efficient.
- With the help of a prioritisation model that is transparent to member companies, the launch of projects has become more predictable and capacity workloads more visible and predictable.
- Customer satisfaction has increased by orders of magnitude, and the introduction of the KAM system has made the formulation of customer needs more precise and better prepared.
- Staff motivation and the effectiveness of forums and meetings has increased, and the typical "I'm in meetings all day but I don't have time to work afterwards" problems previously experienced in organisations of similar size have been seriously reduced.
- The Task Force team has been able to deliver urgent and important developments quickly and efficiently, and several development projects have been successfully completed using agile working methods.
