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Transformation in action - agile working
Monday September 01st 2008. Posted: 08:00
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Developing products faster and delivering a better customer experience has led BT to adopt agile working methods
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One of the three goals driving BT’s transformation agenda to keep the company ahead of the game is “being agile” - simplifying and speeding up the way the company does business. A year after the transformation programme was launched, BT has successfully adopted agile working practices across the organisation.
Writing code - quicker and simpler As part of its transformation into a software-driven services company, BT needed to find new ways of developing products and services that would enable it to take advantage of its open, global, real-time platform while bringing products to market faster and delivering a better customer experience. Convinced that the adoption of agile software development methods would be key to being number one for customer service, BT set up the company’s first agile team. Led by BT Design programme director Paul Karsten, the team’s brief was to completely change the traditional product development process to create the Web21C software development kit (SDK). While the traditional product development process is linear - one step happening after another - agile working means being adaptive, collaborative, flexible and customer led. Paul said: “Agile encourages people to value interactions and individuals over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. It does this with the aim of getting the right solutions to market as quickly as possible.” Collaborative working also meant a change in the working environment: desks are a large square shape to accommodate eight people, one pair per side. “Agile developers work in pairs to ensure the best code is written first time - one writes while the other qualifies and monitors what they have done to improve production quality,” said Paul. Each side contains a central monitor, and - as every person sitting at the desk faces one another - conversation and collaboration are easy and frequent. Webcams help those not in the office to interact. A customer - or someone delegated as a proxy - works with the team on a daily basis to clarify issues and help prioritise work. “And there is no leader in an agile team - management activities are delegated to one team member who organises daily ‘stand-ups’ in which each team member reports what they achieved the day before, what their plan is for the day and the potential impediments they may encounter,” said Paul. Using agile working, the team reduced time to market considerably for the SDK and services - the first release was launched just nine months after the team began development. It is available to both BT and non-BT developers online and has been downloaded more than 11,000 times. Paul said: “The Web21 SDK development team is viewed as an ‘exemplar’ team within BT Design. Many of its members are involved in promoting agile externally, and BT is becoming a recognised leader in agile development.” Agile working - the next step In the spring of 2007, the Web21 SDK development team realised that, although many people had downloaded and used the SDK, the services or capabilities it offered was not being used enough to enhance live products. Team member David Eastman said: “There was a perception that integrating telephony is difficult, and that - as well as targeting developers - BT needed to be able to ‘sell’ the SDK concept to marketers, product development professionals and entrepreneurs.” A small group was tasked with developing a proof of concept product - based on the SDK - that demonstrated how easy BT could make it for external developers to include its services or common capabilities in their own products. Its first alliance was with Tradespace - BT Retail’s free online business community. The team wrote an application - using the “click to call” capability - which placed a call from a prospective customer to a business owner, and vice versa, without revealing the caller number to either party. It became known as Mojo - a web application that lets you make phone calls and send messages to your contacts, either through the Mojo portal or by using a gadget that uses Mojo. David said: “Using Mojo - and the later product Magic Number - an accessible, hosted, easy feature set, developers instantly have the ability to rapidly develop voice-enabled software applications and services without any expertise in the telco domain. “The creation of Mojo proved beyond doubt that the software-as-a-service model works for telephony capabilities. Developers do want to access BT capabilities easily and quickly online - they value the pre-integrated, pre-tested functionality.”
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