HCL Accelerate Unifies DevOps Data and Improves Business Agility at a Global Software Company

The Challenge

Balancing autonomy with governance

Autonomy can be a beneficial aspect of a company’s culture. Allowing teams and individuals to select the tools and processes they prefer instead of mandating specific ways of completing tasks can lead to happier employees and better work outcomes. However, this can also lead to gaps in measurement and governance and difficulty in communication between teams. This is the situation a multinational cyber security software company found themselves in.

“Our company has a deep culture of team autonomy and can select the most suitable behaviour and flow for their development. However, with our DevOps transformation we needed more alignment across customer feedback and product delivery,” said a transformation leader at the company.

Removing the teams’ freedom to choose their own work processes was not an option, since this autonomy had become a hallmark of the company’s culture. But in a DevOps pipeline, these disjointed tools led to slow customer support responses and a lack of visibility across vertical and horizontal software delivery activities.

Further complicating matters was geography. Since the software company has offices across the globe, it was difficult to get fast answers or status updates on work items because teams were separated by time zones.

Most importantly, the software company was struggling to align the business’s goals with development’s priorities. Big business initiatives can span across multiple teams, but these teams were not aware of each other’s work or aligned on strategy. The business team spends time planning, funding, and setting goals, but feedback from the development team comes too late to manage risk in the process. Without a way to trace progress, the company is open to risk in completing initiatives promised to customers.

To fix this, the company wanted a way to continue to empower their teams to make their own decisions about how work gets done by arming all groups across the global organization with up-to-date data and work item visibility so everyone can be aligned and make better decisions. In other words, the organization needed a way to align business agility with IT agility by proactively managing decisions.