How Agile development methodology helped British Telecom?

BT Group plc (trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunication holding company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK, and also provides subscription television and IT services (BT, 2018). Its obvious to recognize the impact of BT in the world of telecommunication, because its available in almost every country, and most importantly due to the qualities of their staffs and their business strategies. As state (Evans, 2006), “BT employs some 8,000 IT professionals in a variety of roles including project & delivery management architecture & design, software engineering, integration & testing, operational support and service management. Much of its internally-focused development work has traditionally been channeled through a number of business-focused delivery projects or programs, ranging from quite small, simple developments to large-scale and complex business solutions, the later tending to be the norm.”

According to Porter (1985), “In business, a competitive advantage is the attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors. A competitive advantage may include access to natural resources, such as high-grade ores or a low-cost power source, highly skilled labor, geographic location, high entry barriers, and access to new technology.” Then, after having some understanding about competitive advantage, so we can speculate about how BT could use Agile development to outperform its competitors.

The agile software development methodology is one of the most common concepts. Agile is advisable to apply in projects of varying complexity and scale. This approach is based on incremental planning of development processes, where the scope of tasks is specified as the project progresses, the creation of accompanying artifacts is not the task of such a project. According to (Guru99, 2019), “These features of the methodology greatly complicate the long-term planning and subsequent maintenance; therefore, the agile approach is advisable to apply for small tasks, ensuring, at an acceptable quality, minimum time and cost of development. Thus, the management of the development of complex information systems occurs due to the decomposition of complex objects into relatively independent parts and components.” Many abroad telecommunications companies use agile project management. For example, British Telecom., by creating a product backlog this allowed the company to see that revenue could be made by focusing attention on product development. Another example to show how Agile development could contribute to competitive advantage, is the case of Telecom Australia. In 2012, Australian large telecom provider embarked on a journey to build a next generation telecom billing and ordering capabilities, thus it began agile transformation. The main problem in project management was a simple overall definition of done, because of the different technologies in different requirement areas each of the areas had their own definition of done relevant to that technology. As a result, according to, (Bourne, 2012) “ Telecom Australia enabled the teams to work in a highly-coordinated fashion to refine the features for the next sprints and excellent transparency of the work at all levels; a highly skilled group and good inter-team coordination and bonding was created; simple flexibility and the principled approach provided by agile method - scrum enabled the teams to adapt and develop the practices and processes to suit the context.” This very example resumes exactly how BT could use efficiently The Agile development to outperform the other competitors in the world stage (like Orange.fr; Lycamobile, etc.), by a having a great inter-team coordination and create a bonding, and more importantly pay attention to the the scrum method. As state (Evans, 2006), “ Agile Development should help resolve some problems, involving your customer as part of your team certainly helps ensure that the solution is developed in line with expectations, and doesn’t incur too many surprises once completed” and He followed “Developing in short iterative cycles again helps to break the problem down into more manageable chucks, and allows feedback to be gleaned early and often. The Scrum method, for instance advocates 30-day cycles.”  Which primary or support activities in Porter’s “Value Chain” (Chapter 7, Bourgeois, 2014) are impacted by BT’s implementation of an agile development process and what benefit (if any) does Agile bring to these activities?

According to (Porter, 1985), “Technology development: Here we have the technological advances and innovations that support the primary activities. These advances are then integrated across the firm or within one of the primary activities to add value. Information technology would fall specifically under this activity.” I would say that the Technology development is impacted by BT’s implementation of an agile development, because in BT’s case here, we can definitely see that the impact to the technology development is obvious, due to the fact that, the traditional software-testing cycle, typically done after coding had been completed, and that would have prolonged the project by several additional months, says (Ramji, 2008) “The company's shift to 90-day and often 30-day software iteration cycles is at least four times as fast, he says, meaning they could deliver the end product that much faster. The central idea behind agile programming is to code quickly, test out what you've done, fix any problems and then move on.” So, that technically could explain the impact of Agile development. And talking about benefit, we can say for sure that the benefit does Agile bring to these activities is according to (Buckley, n.d. ), “The main advantage I see is that you spend more time working on the right [system] features by talking to customers all the time and working on it," he says. This is instead of incorporating customer requirements into software development under a waterfall approach, which includes testing the system with end-users and then discovering "this isn't really what they wanted," says Buckley.

I will conclude by saying that British Telecom has efficiently used Agile development to successfully have a competitive advantage over companies like (Orange, T-Mobile, vodafone, etc.), because they are present and are serving their customers in almost 180 countries in the world. As state (Grant, 2010), “BT managers say the process of Agile development cut the project development time from more than 18 months to nine, producing a return on investment of 80% in the first year.” And he followed “BT customers are being invited into development centers to work with the teams as they develop their systems. A German vehicle maker and a Korean telecoms firm have expressed 

interest.”

References

Bourne L. (2012, September 10). Reflecting on Agile in a telecommunications project. Retrieved May 25, 2019, from http://projectmanager.com.au/reflecting-on-agile-in-a-telecommunications-project/

BT. (2018). Group businesses. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from https://btplc.com/Thegroup/Ourcompany/Groupbusinesses/index.htm

Evans, I. (2006). Agile delivery at British Telecom. Methods and tools, 14(2), 20-27. Retrieved May 10, 2016, from http://www.methodsandtools.com/PDF/mt200602.pdf

Grant, I. (2010, January 28). BT switches to agile techniques to create new products. Retrieved from https://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280091969/BT-switches-to-agile-techniques-to-create-new-products

Hoffman, T. (2008, March 11). BT: A case study in agile programming. Retrieved May 10, 2016, from http://www.infoworld.com/article/2650760/application-development/bt--a-case-study-in-agile-programming.html

Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive advantage. New York: The Free Pess.