Spark NZ: Its kinda agile
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Spark Ventures supports 6 startups and aims to act like a startup itself with an agile mindset. It uses Kanban and forward planning for non-BAU work to share plans and demonstrate IT value. This enables continuous change handling and focuses on mindsets over tools. People and customer experience are prioritized through goal setting, collaboration, shared values and communication.
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Spark NZ: Its kinda agile
- 1. Spark: Its kinda agile? A Spark Venture’s Story Pete Yates – Head PMO, Ops, IT & Platforms @peteyatesnz
- 2. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept 2 Our Ventures What is Spark Ventures? With over 500,000 customers
- 3. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept Why? 3@peteyatesnz
- 4. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept Supporting & growing 6 startups The Ventures could act like startups, IT could not 4 Learn fast & act with agility Mind-set Shift Keep $$ low People Scale & Stability Guiding Principles “Build now, scale for later”
- 5. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept agile? 5 Kanban vs Scrum Sprints BAU vs non BAU @peteyatesnz Enables organisations to deal with continuous change Mind-sets & Individuals Over Tools & Processes
- 6. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept Project vs BAU 6 How did we solve this problem? • Forward planning non BAU work • Creating a future road-map for work – backlog • How can we share with the rest of teams what we are working? • Demonstrating the value of IT • Reduce shoulder tapping of IT resources? “Adopt & Adapt”
- 7. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept 7 The way we work
- 8. Spark: Innovating in the Cloud 1st Sept 8 Microservices Product Ecosystem Continuous Delivery Ecosystem Technology Ecosystem Infrastructure Ecosystem Open Source Contributions Spark Technology Capabilities Monitoring & Analytics CRM Mobile & Wearables Web App Test Automation Billing Payment Identity ISTM Technology Platform
- 9. Lightbox simultaneous streams Bigpipe subscribers 100% to 15-30 mins for env. builds 1day The last 12 months… Over 6m hours of content viewed 100% to 5-10mins for prod deployments 45mins
- 10. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept Mind-set shift 10 Customer (CX/UX)
- 11. Spark: Its kinda agile 1st Sept People 11 It’s all about your people…… - Where they set goals that they can aspire to, - the way they work together, - the values that they share, - ways in which they communicate with each other.
Editor's Notes
- Talk today about how the shared services team (like you guys the IT team) has managed to support the rapid rate of change required by Spark and Spark Ventures, before I kick into the main part of the presentation, I want to show you a video…
- Show of hands: “Does any one know much about Spark Ventures?” Created 6 ventures from scratch - creation of lean Canvas to POC and business case and delivery Bigpipe – ISP in 6 months Qrious – Big data platform Semble – mobile wallet Morepork – Home automation Lightbox – Video on Demand in 12 months Public Wi-Fi With the aim of either passing these ventures to Spark, going it alone or closing down… Invest in 2 others Putti and Jupl Spark has made significant investment in Ventures, where the current crop of Ventures have matured in to businesses/products where they are starting to add value to our Spark customers – for example there is over 100,000 user so far of the free to Spark customer’s public wi-fi…..we have also seen a reduction in churn since the introduction of lightbox and broadband bundling…
- Ventures was born out of the fact that Telecom was facing revenues that were declining or static at best…. It also faced an industry that was being commoditised…and had to look for new revenue streams.. Started Spark Ventures just over 3 years ago…why…to create new revenue streams available in the digital space as demonstrated by this recent study conducted by EY with global Telcos (TV and Video being at the top…so Lightbox fits the bill there), AT&T and Time Warner, Sky and Vodafone NZ “the reason Telecom is now Spark”
- Part of shared services group providing Ops, Customer Care, internal IT and Software Delivery to the Ventures – effectively the IT team… Mindset shift – non traditional view of IT, automation, cloud/hybrid, non silo’d way of working, multi skilled with cloud and SaaS experience, Keep costs low - they are start ups and as such want to keep their cost as low as possible People - Hiring a team based on attitude, fit, and their multi skills/experiences, customer first approach, happy to work in a fluid environment. Had to bring in experienced AWS resources (such as eIT) before we built up our skills internally. Collective recruitment, where team interviews potential candidate. Clear expectations with understood roles and responsibilities Scale with Stability – Automate, grow as the Ventures grow, working with a hybrid environment with people, process and technology to support it… Guiding principles - to base architectural decision on – such as cloud first, build now, scale for later, 80% fit is ok, automate and reuse, helped empower our people – Re-use of design/tech ultimately, what is core vs non core? Optional Content High level over view of AWS: MultiAZ highly available dev/test/prod environment includes EC2 instances, Elastic Load balancer, RDS multi AZ instances, security groups, monitoring/logging (cloudwatch), SSL implementation.
- Ventures looked to utilise agile methodologies—which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a alternative to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even into the C-suite. Devs – Sprints, Scrum team (in cells) that flexed depending on deliverables, sprint planning, points etc…what I call traditional Agile Ops teams – utilised Kanban but still in 2 weeks sprints, Becoming an agile organization is an increasingly urgent necessity for companies in today’s digital economy, yet most companies have a deeply embedded command organization architecture and culture – built on identifying products owners… BAU vs non BAU – talk to that in the next slide people are more important—the goals that people aspire to, the mind-set and how they work with others…some were not used to working in an Agile way so we took the adopt and adapt approach to implement…very much an iterative approach…
- It has definitely been an iterative approach, where we have taken the elements of Kanban that suited the way we worked. That said, we have not been afraid to change the approach if it was not working. For example when we first started we initially held daily stand ups but that soon changed to every other day and, eventually, changed to having them at the beginning and end of the sprint only. We do however run 2 weekly sprints so the team have a known period of time to complete work. Kanban allows us to prioritise work and to create a back log where it also gives our customers some certainty of delivery times and fits in with Software Dev sprints Service Management We also took this approach to service management, especially with changes…virtual CABs and automated approval process
- Start with the product manager to create user stories Work in cells assigned to a product or product line Through refinement to planning (if required this will involve other teams in the planning especially if they are dependency (ideally we try to stop other teams being blockers) Delivery is either in a product dedicated team in 2 week sprint or shared teams as part of their 2 week sprint but through more of a Kanban style of approach. Finishing with a retrospective……what went well etc…
- A high level view of the under lying technology we use to create and support the Ventures – 99% cloud based…so we could focus on adding value rather than being email admins or tools admins…we just consumed… E.g. Cloud based billing platform – non core Wiki based collaboration through Confluence – with the interoperability through other Atalassian based tools…
- A quick view of some Venture stats spinning up the environments from 1 day to 15-30 mins. Manual> Puppet> Packer Deployments – 5-10 mins using bamboo and Elastic bean stalk (EBS) Constantly looking ways to improve
- All about the customer as Leanne previously mentioned Customer first…no longer a tech conversation/solution looking for a problem…we work back from the customer and the desired experience we want for them and build a solution from that point Digital mindset It’s a fine balance between traditional and digital….you don’t want to totally neglect the legacy systems at the expense of just focusing on innovation…. IT Engineers - non traditional view of IT, automation, open source, cloud/hybrid, non silo’d way of working, multi skilled with cloud and SaaS experience Leaders Leaders are supporting innovation around core solutions…e.g. not going to change the way you release code per product/solution Leaders need to set the vision/set expectations and enable your team to deliver we did this through setting up some guiding principles
- Get the right people on board…some may not have been used to the fluid nature of working as start-up at the beginning…now matured as an IT group..needs different skills and mind-set from those early days… To help get the right people on board: Collective recruitment – as much of the team meets them and we try to recruit through our networks…. Team charter – how they will work together…goals for the teams…Open honest, fair communications, not personal – part of charter people are more important—the goals that people aspire to, the mind-set and how they work with others…some were not used to working in an Agile way so we took the adopt and adapt approach to implement…very much an iterative approach…
- So for us it has been a adopt and adapt mind-set….we learnt the ways what worked and what did not…its very much an iterative process…hence the title here…its kinda agile……..thanks …