A journey towards a flatter more networked organization in a fast-moving telco enterprise software environment, within a very huge enterprise. Itai tells the agile story of CloudBand - one of the hottest business units in Alcatel-Lucent.

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The CloudBand Journey (so far…)
Itai Mendelsohn

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CLOUDBAND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Orchestrates, automates and optimizes vNFs
across distributed clouds and network
CLOUDBAND NODE
Pre-configured turnkey node that includes
compute, storage and networking with software
designed for remote operation
CLOUDBAND™ IS THE
FIRST
NFV PLATFORM
INHERENTLY
DESIGNED FOR
CARRIER APPS
NFV APP
Cloud Management and Orchestration
NETWORK
NFV APP NFV APP NFV APP
DISTRIBUTED CLOUD NODES
APIs
APIs
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE
CloudBand Node
NFV
INFRASTRUCTURE
CloudBand™ – the platform for NFV

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We are building that…
Multiple technology
layers
~85 people team
This is our Journey…

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Structure - Culture

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Larman’s “laws” for org structure
Status Quo Culture Follows
Structure

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De-centralized control
Well, we don’t do submarines… but we do believe
that:
• We need to give control (we never used that
term though)
• Our developers know better than “us”
• Management layers = complexity
• Developers rule! – That’s the new market
• We need to filter the “noise” (aka corporate tax)
We need a simple, flat and empowered
organization

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Moving quality attention to the “left”

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At the end it’s all about the Culture

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Culture – or what is agile for us?
people accountability
friendship
trust
transparency
togetherness
Hands-on
business goals
contradictions
simplicity
context
people motivation

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Right, but how???

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Let’s review the goals first
• No sync/dependencies meetings
• Less cycles between dev and QA
• Less people in the room
• Simple decision making
• Happy people
• People making decisions
• People taking initiatives
• Developers with “context”
At the end... Velocity and innovation that is
people (engineers) driven
people process

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How - or the things we did
Make it
Flat
Shift
Left
Our
“Spotify”

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Nice but…. (or the bad and the ugly)
Attrition Quality
?
Lost people

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It’s the first step…

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In retro…
We don’t have sync meetings (between teams)
We see more features initiated by developers (or QA)
Easy to make decisions…
More people with more initiatives (but still not all over the place)
❌Quality and velocity … we are not there yet
❌People are happy…? you will need to ask them 
☀As always, there are tons of things to improve

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Thanks