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

Transcription

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 Employees: 12,000 CA Technologies Mainframe BU Employees: circa 1,000 BUSINESS CHALLENGE SOLUTION BENEFIT CA Technologies provides Companies that use the Mainframe Business Unit CA Technologies Mainframe innovative software that helps mainframe platform run some partnered with internal agile Business Unit now delivers organizations transform IT and of their most critical operations transformation consultants to quarterly releases and has business operations. Products on it. CA Technologies needed move more than 70 scrum teams reduced backlog, thereby developed by the Mainframe to accelerate development of into SAFe agile release trains. increasing feature velocity, Business Unit power many new releases in key product CA Agile Central, along while keeping quality high. Fortune 1000 companies areas, while maintaining its with CA Endevor SCM, This has led to increased mission-critical applications. near-perfect quality in order CA Development Environment satisfaction levels among to help customers run these for z Systems and CA Application mainframe customers. mission-critical operations. Lifecycle Conductor, increases visibility to progress outcomes through delivery.

2 2 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES 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 IT Operations, Predictive Analytics, DevOps, Security, Storage, 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. The breadth of CA Technologies mainframe solutions continues to be 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 is a critical platform for many customers, housing 70 percent of corporate data on it and requiring percent availability and reliability. Monique Boucher, VP, Mainframe Business Unit, explains, When competing in this market our success relies not only on retaining our existing mainframe customers, but also on growing market share, which means increasing the velocity with which we can deliver new value to the market. Satisfying ever-increasing customer demands proved challenging in a market that operates on month product cycles. That s especially true in a customer governance environment extremely adverse to any source of risk, which also expects to maintain compatibility with a wide variety of fast-evolving mobile to mainframe applications that are part of the digital enterprise. The organization was aware of many modern development and management practices, yet found them difficult to apply at scale, 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 First, the mainframe organization 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 road to applying modern DevOps toolchain approaches, using CA Technologies own software tools that connected mobile to mainframe. 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 their customers, and today they are successfully demonstrating value-add capabilities to their customers every two to four weeks.

3 3 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES This first wave demonstrated results. As Vikas Sinha, SVP Mainframe Business Unit, recalls, We have had tremendous success rolling out our agile transformation initiative. We have 74 teams engaged in agile development, and we have shipped 56 new product releases with zero defects in the past 8 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, launching 4-plus new successful organic innovations. 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. Vikas Sinha SVP 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, leadership focused carefully on ensuring that the adoption approach would not result in calcifying the existing problems, but instead would allow the organization to accelerate the achievement of overall strategic goals. Developing agile release trains 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 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, quantified 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 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

4 4 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES 31 releases delivered with zero defects in one year 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 100 percent aligned to products; some trains worked on many products, and other trains were dedicated to specific products. 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. 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 would 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 level 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. Releases are now delivered quarterly, compared with every 18 to 24 months previously, and quality remains high as the team continues to take intense pride in their ability to provide defect-free software to their customers. Over the year, 31 releases were delivered with zero defects. Solution-level predictability and impact is also improving, as each successive PI is allowing the ARTs to demonstrate tighter understanding of intended outcomes. This has resulted in: 44 percent reduction in defect backlog 7 percent decrease in support call volume 61 percent fall in PI escalation. 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 a 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 and develop innovation with machine learning, blockchain and mainframe as a service. As Sinha states, 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. We were able to prioritize, mobilize

5 5 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: CA TECHNOLOGIES We are delivering better software to happier customers, resulting in year-on-year organic new sales growth of 20 percent. Ashok Reddy General Manager, CA Technologies Mainframe Business Unit 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, expanding CA Technologies pool of customer advocates for mainframe software to more than 300 and increasing its Net Promoter Score (NPS). The ability to provide clarity and constancy of intent has also 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 integrated with key mainframe DevOps solutions CA Endevor, CA Application Lifecycle Conductor and CA Development Environment for z Systems, we are delivering better software to happier customers, resulting in year-on-year organic new sales growth of 20 percent. For more information, please visit 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. Connect with CA Technologies Copyright 2018 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks 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. CS _0218