new gears system

Our client’s business agility was crippled by its inability to deliver high quality, low risk change quickly.  Our team delivered a new agile change process enabling rapid, dynamic response to customer needs.

Business Challenge

Our client was failing to take advantage of market opportunities and realise business value because its ability to deliver high quality, low risk change was hampered by traditional, waterfall-centric production change management process.

The pace at which software teams could develop changes through the use of agile practices was not being matched by the organisations ability to deliver these changes to the business in a timely manner.

The stringent change management process, enforced to try and  to mitigate the risk of poor quality change was penalizing high performance teams and was identified as a bottleneck to our client’s vision of delivering ‘ideas to production, safely in a day’.

The Solution

Our team created and managed a stakeholder working group with the aim of defining and delivering an optimised Change Management process to be adopted by agile teams in pursuit of rapid and frequent production deployment.

The new change template and process provides application teams with sufficiently agile release and deployment practices, a more efficient path through the Production Change Management phase of the Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC).

The new template/process supports same day change by:

  • Reducing change lead time from 6 days to 4 hours
  • Removing the requirements for manual Change Approval Board (CAB) signoff
  • Reducing the number of approvers and attachments required to approve change

A pilot phase was initiated with a small number of teams (10+) along with a continuous improvement approach to refine the templates and processes.

In addition a rich set of APIs were created (and are being continuously enhanced) enabling change requests to be raised directly from teams’ automated Continuous Delivery pipelines. Blueprints are also now available for all teams to allow further automation of their software delivery processes.

Business Benefits

  • 8x more changes released by onboarded applications
  • Change Lead time reduced from 6 days to 4 hours
  • 30% reduction in number of high impact business incidents
  • 44 applications onboarded in first 12 months

The Result

The new Agile Change Management Process is now available to be rolled out enterprise-wide. Changes can now be raised 4 hours in advance, a huge reduction on the previous 6 day lead time and manual workload required.

In the 12 months of this project so far, 44 different applications have been onboarded into the new agile change process, greatly increasing efficiency and flexibility in releasing change. Their business units are reaping the benefits of being able to respond within less than a day to market demands and customer needs.

The Future

The Agile Change Management Processnumber of applications onboarded has been a huge success for the teams who have adopted it, and it’s estimated that a further 350 teams will be using the new improved change process by the end of 2019.

Increasing the footprint of the Agile Change Process and onboarding all remaining applications will enable the business to become truly agile and competitive in all areas of the market.

The Team

Our Sandhata team have driven this project from start to finish. We bring our expert knowledge and innovative ideas gained from many client experiences to ensure that our clients achieve the best solution appropriate to their goals.

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