CA Technologies Increases Customer Satisfaction and Repeat Business by Scaling Agile for Mainframe Development

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1 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY CA Technologies Increases Customer Satisfaction and Repeat Business by Scaling Agile for Mainframe Development CLIENT PROFILE Industry: IT Organization: CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit CA Technologies Employees: 12,000 Mainframe Business Unit Employees: circa 1,000 BUSINESS CA Technologies provides innovative software that help organizations transform IT and business operations. Products developed by the Mainframe Business Unit power many Fortune 1000 companies mission-critical applications. CHALLENGE Lorem ipsum Mainframe technology dolor sit amet, consectetur is a shrinkingadipiscing market, yet elit. In id enim diam. increasingly competitive Mauris as imperdiet players vieaugue for market at share. consequat CA Technologies condimentum. needed to Aliquam erat accelerate development volutpat. of Donec new releases a ligulainmetus. key product Maecenas areas whilelobortis, maintaining dui a varius its near-perfect laoreet. quality in order to grow share in a declining market. SOLUTION Lorem ipsum Mainframe Business dolor situnit amet, consectetur partnered with adipiscing internalelit. agile In id enim diam.consultants transformation Mauris imperdiet to move approximately augue at consequat 90 scrum teams condimentum. into SAFe Aliquam agile release erat trains. volutpat. CA Agile Donec aincreases Central ligula metus. visibility to Maecenas help progress lobortis, outcomes dui a of varius key strategic laoreet.work. BENEFIT Lorem CA Technologies ipsum dolor Mainframe sit amet, consectetur Business Unitadipiscing has improved elit. In id enim time to market diam.and Mauris quality imperdiet of productaugue development. at consequat This is boosting condimentum. customer Aliquam eratleading satisfaction, volutpat. to Donec a ligula increased market metus. share Maecenas in the mainframe lobortis, dui a varius laoreet. solutions space.

2 2 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES ca.com Business Powering mission-critical applications CA Technologies helps organizations remove the barriers between ideas and outcomes, enabling the modern software factory by transforming IT and business operations with innovative software solutions. CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit is responsible for approximately 250 solutions that span workload automation, storage, security, databases and more. Mainframe technology lies at the heart of many of the world s mission-critical platforms from financial services and manufacturing to utility providers and government institutions. Some of the CA Technologies mainframe solutions are more than 30 years old and are still being augmented with new products and product releases as customer needs evolve. The mainframe organization represents nearly 60 percent of CA Technologies (FY16) revenues and comprises approximately 1,000 employees in locations across the USA, India and Europe. Challenge Meeting customer demands Mainframe remains a critical platform for many customers, but it is no longer perceived as a growing market due to the rise in distributed computing, cloud and other technologies that have displaced mainframe over the years. Monique Boucher, VP, Mainframe Business Unit, explains, When competing in this market our success relies on retaining our existing mainframe customers, but also on growing market share, which means increasing uptake of new products and releases. Satisfying ever-increasing customer demands proved challenging in a market that operates on month product cycles in a customer governance environment extremely adverse to any source of risk, while still being expected to maintain compatibility with a wide variety of fast-evolving applications from outside the mainframe. The organization was aware of many modern development and management practices, yet found them difficult to apply in 30-year-old code bases, requiring deep expertise and experience to navigate successfully. We needed greater insight into where customers were going and what they needed from new mainframe solutions and we needed to be able to respond to quickly to customer and market needs with highly reliable products and new releases. The question was how to get there, summarizes Boucher. Solution Stabilizing delivery with scrum The mainframe organization first needed to drive stability in its development process to create a common platform from which to evolve. Scrum was already emerging in pockets as early as 2010, and early successes led the overall organization to move actively in 2013 to adopt scrum as a standard team-level practice. Meanwhile it started on the long road to apply modern devops toolchain approaches to amplify the existing engineering practices used on the mainframe technology stack. In this effort, the organization invested deeply in training its engineers, identifying and empowering product owners, and creating the habits required for effective team-level agility. The individual scrum teams created deep relationships with

3 3 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES ca.com their customers, and are successfully demonstrating value-add capabilities to their customers every two to four weeks. This first wave demonstrated results. As Desikan Madhavanur, SVP of IT Orchestration recalls, We have had tremendous success rolling out our agile transformation initiative. We have 74 teams engaged in agile development, we have shipped 56 new product releases with zero defects in the past eight quarters, while achieving 45 percent reduction in defect backlog, and 44 percent reduction in incoming support backlog. In the same time frame, the group increased its ability to deploy organic innovation in the form of new products solving customer problems. By deploying SAFe, we were able to get a large organization of more than 70 development teams aligned around a common vision and focus efforts on a small number of critical initiatives. Desikan Madhavanur SVP of IT Orchestration, CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit Improving alignment and accelerating strategy Team level agility was necessary, but not sufficient to continue removing customers barriers with the desired impact. Boucher summarizes the problem succinctly: Quarterly checks indicated that teams were more productive. However, assessments also revealed that teams work was not always aligned with business strategy. The leadership team again looked to agile approaches to help solve this problem, only at far larger scale than the team level agility practices used previously. The mainframe leadership team partnered with internal agile experts to identify a path to create this strategic alignment, leading by example in the next wave of CA Technologies overall agile transformation initiative. Given initial successes experimenting with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe ) in parts of the Mainframe Business Unit and its selection as the default framework for the overall transformation, it was the obvious direction for solving the larger alignment problem. However, the leadership focused carefully on ensuring that the adoption approach didn t result in calcifying the existing problems, but instead allowed the organization to accelerate the achievement of the overall strategic goals. Achieving that goal started by mapping the larger goals of the various mainframe market segments into a common language of capabilities based on the value stream layer of SAFe 4.0, and thus visualizing the combined roadmap across the entire mainframe portfolio. This large-group facilitated activity involving over 50 leaders

4 4 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES ca.com We have had tremendous success rolling out our agile initiative. Desikan Madhavanur SVP of IT Orchestration, CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit from across the organization clearly highlighted the need to prioritize and focus investment on a smaller number of high impact solutions aligned with customers most pressing needs. With the outcomes of this work captured in CA Agile Central, the teams achieved clarity in how they could contribute to the most valuable work. However, this improvement also pulled teams to work together differently in ways that stressed the organization s design and people s interactions. As this tension developed over three months, the Mainframe Senior Leadership team identified an initial set of six core strategies to pursue and catalogued their ability to free up teams to focus on that work. They then gathered the top 30 leaders across the organization to perform a two day immersive value stream workshop. During this workshop they identified the four strategies the organization was able to pursue, identified the relative investment and teams to focus on each of those strategies, shaped those teams into eight agile release trains, and aligned those release trains into four value streams where one of the strategies served as the vision for each value stream. These eight release trains were then launched into trains by gathering the existing scrum teams over the course of the next several months, working to identify the train-level leadership teams, composing feature backlogs aligned to the capabilities and strategies for the group, and aligning them into a common cadence of sprints and program increments (PI). This train formation represented a huge mindset shift for the group because for the first time the organizational design wasn t fully aligned to products; some trains worked on many products, and other products were shared across trains. The leadership team then interleaved this quarterly PI cadence with quarterly portfolio steering for each of the business segments and an overall business strategy steering cadence, allowing a continuous feedback cycle between actual progress providing customer benefits and the evolving strategies of the business.

5 5 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES With agile methodologies and CA Agile Central, we are delivering better software to happier customers. Ashok Reddy General Manager, CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit. The Mainframe Business Unit knew that using the common cadence for planning would not be enough; that they would need to leverage that cadence for integration and demonstration of the emerging solutions. Despite the more complicated product-to-train relationship model, it was initially deemed that in the first PI the individual teams would be responsible for cross-team integration and a post PI inspection will inform the design of a systems team solution. Once data was collected from that first PI, inspection of the overall burden for integration across the largest, three-art value stream led to a recognition that pulling a few engineers from across various teams into a value-stream system team would pay for itself, and would likely even accelerate feature development for the teams and trains. This led to the formalization of a system team at the value stream layer to develop, maintain, and operate the integration and testing environments across the entire solution layer. This system team actively collaborates with the solution architect, the system architects, and the scrum teams to ensure that platform and environment challenges are reduced and the impact to feature productivity minimized. Benefit Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty This new model has been operating for approximately a year, with many of the release trains having completed three PIs and entering their fourth cycle. Quality remains high, and the team continues to take intense pride in their ability to provide defect-free software to their customers. Solution-level predictability and impact is also improving, as each successive PI is allowing the ARTs to demonstrate tighter understanding of intended outcomes, in turn resulting in a steady decrease of missed commitments and schedule overruns. The improved consistency and focus on impact has placed an extreme focus on providing clarity of purpose and mission from the product leadership team to the teams and trains. This focus has led to dramatically improved ability to articulate strategy and roadmaps clearly and succinctly, in turn bringing a larger group of people and roles into finding creative approaches to solve customer problems. As Madhavanur states, By deploying SAFe, we were able to get a large organization of more than 90 development teams aligned around a common vision and focus efforts on a small number of critical initiatives. We were able to prioritize, mobilize and accelerate innovation cycles with continuous steering from key stake holders and customers, ensuring continuous alignment to market priorities. This alignment is being felt by customers as well. The ability to provide clarity and constancy of intent has deepened customer relationships with the Mainframe Strategic Advisory Council, allowing critical customer feedback to directly influence and steer the overall direction, without causing the day to day churn too often associated with customer requests. As Ashok Reddy, General Manager, CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit concludes, With agile methodologies and CA Agile Central, we are delivering better software to happier customers.

6 6 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES Written by Monique Boucher, Desikan Madhavenur, Ashok Reddy, Eric Willeke and Sridharan Parthasarathy Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. Copyright 2017 CA, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document does not contain any warranties and is provided for informational purposes only. Any functionality descriptions may be unique to the customers depicted herein and actual product performance may vary