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Deliver change with an agile production process

The world is changing rapidly. Whether it’s through societal shifts or new technology, we need to move with it. The challenge for IT organisations is to keep striking that balance between innovation and stability. It might seem like a contradiction, but it doesn’t have to be. The trick to achieving agility is simply planning ahead better. Because planning creates insights into capacity, costs, bottlenecks and events. It also helps to prevent technical debt (when you fall behind on code or software system maintenance). And you don’t need us to tell you about the risks involved in delaying essential maintenance.

With Application Lifecycle Management, we use agile tools that help clarify change and align it with the need for innovation and maintenance. For this, we use roadmaps and a balanced backlog:

  • The application roadmap contains all functional plans with a solution for the next two years. This way, the team knows exactly what work to expect. This roadmap is a tool to ensure that you have user stories of sufficient quality in plenty of time.

  • The platform roadmap contains all relevant technical developments for the solution. This roadmap provides visibility when major upgrades are needed to the technical platform, when support expires and what new technical capabilities become available.

  • The balanced backlog includes all activities for the next quarter, prioritised by business value. The items are divided into new functionalities (change) and technical management (continuity).

Roadmaps

The roadmaps feed the backlog with user stories (see figure). This approach prevents the backlog from filling up completely, ensuring you stay agile. And it fits within frameworks like SAFe, because a team has all the information it needs to align effectively with the other teams within an agile release train.

Agile working

No wonder agile working has become so popular. What we often forget, though, is that delivering efficient software is another important starting point for agile working. This calls for adjustments to the organisation.

To ensure data and the way you deliver it constantly evolves with changing needs, your organisation needs to involve users in the business in short-cyclic iterations when developing, managing and applying new functionalities. Not only does this require enough data professionals with the right qualifications, expertise and the right mindset. It also means that the whole organisation has to master the new way of working, because it is a new way of business alignment with data provision: both sides need to be constantly engaged in and understand each other’s domains. In short, the only way to reap the benefits of flexible data and data provision is to embrace flexibility.

Organisational agility requires a fast and effective method of IT production that moves with changing demand. Agile working helps by providing short-cyclic iterations, in which the business and data sides work closely together to deliver business value. No more long, drawn-out black-box projects without any certainty over the outcome. The focus is on taking the ‘smallest big’ step each time that leads to a tangible result. Scaling up agile working within the organisation is a vital part of the approach, as the entire organisation benefits from it as a step in its wider digital transformation.

Would you like more information on this topic? Get in touch.

Let's talk

Dennis Struyk

Director Public

dennis.struyk@ordina.nl

+31 6 3100 5583