asas 2015 gert florijn & eelco rommes

LIMITS TO AGILITY?

ASAS 2015

Gert Florijn & Eelco Rommes

October 2015

CONTEXT: IT-MAINTENANCE

Agile improves software development. But manyorganizations do not develop any software. Theybuy it.

What can such organizations learn from agile development? How can they become more agile?

hospitals waterboard municipality

IT IN HOSPITALS - THE IDEAL PICTURE

RDZ versie2.2 Referentiedomeinenmodel Ziekenhuizen van i-ziekenhuisi-ziekenhuis is een samenwerkingprogramma van de NL ziekenhuizen en UMC’s op initiatief van NVZ en NICTIZ

For example: a hospital fulfills many tasks, as thisreference model shows.

IT IN HOSPITALS - PRACTICE

Any hospital needs a lot of IT to run.

MANY FACTORS OF COMPLEXITY

P Projects

F Functional maintenanceF

The typical resulting IT-landscape is complex and hard to manage.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS

A few core systems, many satellites A few vendors dominate the market Many interfaces to sync data Old technology, old data Mostly COTS

Laws & policies

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

Vendors

Partners

Users

Coupling Pressure to change comes from varioussides. Changes cause a rippleeffect.

THE NEED FOR AGILITY - EXAMPLE

Hospitals become networkorganisations, exchanginginformation with all kinds of partners.

Mutual dependencies make theripple effect stronger.

Agility becomes more andmore important.

7 WAYS OF CHANGING (OR NOT)

...as seenin practice...

How do such IT-organisations typically deal with change?

ISOLATING THE CHANGE

Select, procure, implement in isolation.Create islands of automation to reduce complexity.But under water, these islands are connected. Theyform an ecosystem. Changes on one island cause changes on others.

Source: www.pixgood.com - archipelago islands

TRENCH WARFARE

IT-departments may try to avoid change by developingtactics to delay changes, like strictly followingprocedures, endless investigations, risk analyses, speaking in jargon, all kinds of approval boards, etc.This may buy time, but it is not very collegial.

Source: www.militaryhistorynow.com

BIG BANG

Large, critical systems are typicallyupgraded or replaced in a big bang migration.An incremental approach can be too complex to manage, due to the many interdependencies.

Source: The Big Bang Theory

SPECIAL OFF-THE-SHELF

Buying off-the-shelf software, thenadapting it to suit the specificneeds of the organisation is common practice. It is also expensive and risky andmakes it harder to implementinevitable fruture updates.

Source: Buzzfeed.com - the “Land, Air and Sea Burger”

REFUSING TO CHOOSE

Many organisations try to do too much at once. They lack overview and mechanisms forsetting priorities. This leads to manyunfinished projects. Some live for a long time, making no progress but not failing either.

Source: hdimagegallery.net – too much choice

IT AS A CROWBAR

Changing IT is often not enough to change an organisation.

JUST DO IT

Aka the golfcourse application.

“I just bought this new application, please install it for me.”

CHANGING THE WAY WE CHANGE

... 6 suggestionsto become

more agile...

How can organisations such as these become more agile?

VIEW THE LANDSCAPE AS A SYSTEM

Looking at a landscape as a single, coherent whole, challenges an organisation to manage it as such.

Interfaces, coupling, integration an integral part of that system, enabling it to work.

Source: posti più belli del mondo

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

An overview of the landscape is crucial. What do we have? Where is information stored, shared, used?

Landscape photographs are created with the viewer anda specific goal in mind.

Broad strokes are more important than details.Source: Barcelona Photography Courses

MANAGE THE TECHNICAL DEBT

Keep the technical debt manageable.Life cycle management, timely upgrades, reducingspecials, choose solutions that fit the regime.There is business value in refactoring.

Source: gifsgallery.com

IF IT HURTS, DO IT MORE OFTEN

Automate what you can: generating test data from production, deployment, monitoring, regression testing, etc.

Quality work requires quality tools.Source: Coyote & Correcaminos de Looney Tunes

THE PRODUCT OWNER IS A TEAM

Organize productownership at the landscape level.This is a hard task, which probably needs a team to support it.

Source: usa365.nl/murdock-interview

EARN A PLACE AT THE TABLE

Some IT decisions belong at the board level.IT-experts need access to them.

Source: www.amc.com/shows/mad-me

YES, BUT...

@@slide to be done – alvast wat tekst hieronder

This is not easy and there are costs involved.But that is no reason not to do it.

HOW AGILE CAN WE GET?

There are many open questions waiting to beanswered.

But perhaps we can make elephants dance.

Let’s see how agile we can get.Source: Who says elephants can t dance

CONTACT US

Gert Florijn gert.florijn@mxi.nl

Eelco Rommes eelco.rommes@mxi.nl