How using agile changed BT/British Telecom?

Agile development methods are being adopted by a growing number of software development teams and organizations. Until 2004, British Telecom (BT) has yet made any serious inroads into agile development. After the arrival of the new CIO at the company, he understood and was aware of the business benefits that can be derived through faster and more effective software delivery and the motivational impact it can has on development teams if agile development is adopted. Therefore; he systematically replaced the company’s long-standing waterfall based delivery processes with a new one that shaped the key principles of agile delivery (Evans, 2006).

Where Agile is a time boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. It works by breaking projects down into little bits of user functionality called user stories, prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short two week cycles called iterations (Rasmusson, 2015). On the other hand, traditional waterfall treats analysis, design, coding, and testing as discrete phases in a software project, which has the following challenges (Rasmusson, 2015):

-        Poor quality: If the project starts to run out of time and money, testing is the last and only phase left. This means good projects are forced to cut testing short and quality suffers.

-        Poor visibility: working software isn't produced until the end of the project; the last 20% of the project always seems to take 80% of the time. Therefore; on a Waterfall project you never really know where you are.

-        Too risky: because you never know if you are going to make it until the end.

-        Can’t handle change: it's just not a great way for handling change.

In 2005, BT Group began replacing an aging Unix-based phone-traffic monitoring system with a Web-centric architecture. The purpose was to allow traffic managers to make quicker changes to switches and other physical devices in order to handle shifts in network loads on any point in the company's vast telecommunications network and without risking system overloads (Hoffman, 2008).

The new system, rolled out in late 2005, has made the work of these phone traffic controllers much easier for network load balancing; the system it replaced was difficult to upgrade. “At that point, few people in the company even knew how the old system worked”, says Kerry Buckley, a lead software developer in Ipswich, U.K., who worked on that project team.

But the most dynamic part of the development effort was that the project was completed within the construct of BT's nascent 90-day agile development cycle. A traditional software-testing cycle, typically done after coding had been completed, would have prolonged the project by several additional months. The company's shift to 90-day and often 30-day software iteration cycles is at least four times as fast, 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 (Hoffman, 2008).

According to Porter, value is built through the value chain which is a series of activities undertaken by the company to produce a product or service. Each step in the value chain contributes to the overall value of a product or service. The value chain is made up of two sets of activities (Bourgeois, 2014):

-        Primary activities: the functions that directly impact the creation of a product or service, such as: inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, Sales/Marketing, and services.

-        Support activities: the functions in an organization that support, and cut across, all of the primary activities, such as: firm infrastructure, human resource management, technology development, and procurement.

I think that all the primary and support activities explained in Porter’s “Value Chain” theory are impacted by BT’s implementation of an agile development process, but the impact on support activities might be clearer. For example, employing 8000 IT professionals in a variety of roles such as project management, software engineering, operational support, and etc.. This activity by BT is related to most of the support activities from procurement to human resource management to technology development and to firm infrastructure. Regarding the primary activities, it could be excluded clearly from the quotes of Ramji and Rangaswami, as they said “BT's shift from traditional waterfall development techniques to agile has led to significant productivity and business” (Hoffman, 2008).

References:

·        Bourgeois, D. T. (2014). Information Systems for Business and Beyond. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License.

·        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

·        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

·        Rasmusson, J. (2015). What is Agile? Retrieved May 24, 2016, from http://www.agilenutshell.com/