Product and platform
Highlights
- Ever since the first lockdowns hit businesses across the globe, digital transformation became a perpetual to-do on the board agenda.
- Every business must navigate its challenges to stay in business, which calls for an approach that ensures repeatable success.
- And the key to repeatable success with digital transformation lies in one word: Agile.
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Call for agile
Digital transformation involves rebuilding business processes and, sometimes, the entire operating model by embracing new technologies to deliver enhanced customer value.
One of the critical hurdles in realizing these desired outcomes is aligning the envisioned strategy to execution. Without a clear line of sight from strategy to execution, enterprises find it challenging to identify and prioritize initiatives, resolve bottlenecks, and manage multiple projects and programs. Because digital transformation entails enterprise-level change, it introduces confusion, fear, and complexity, ultimately resulting in control loss. Moreover, the lack of end-to-end visibility across a value stream can hinder the ability to differentiate opportunities from inefficiencies.
A value stream represents a series of activities that deliver value to the customer, from ideation to product delivery. With this logical, end-to-end view, product and program managers can identify areas of improvement, understand dependencies, and optimize resource allocation. Effective planning and control become crucial to simultaneously managing multiple projects, each with objectives, timelines, and stakeholders. In such chaotic times, agile serves as a bridge between strategy and execution. It facilitates strategy-execution alignment and ensures that the ultimate business value is delivered to customers with an end-to-end view of value streams. However, agile principles must scale across the enterprise and fulfill the critical needs of multiple stakeholders, from technical leads to business owners, to facilitate the realization of digital transformation objectives.
Rationalize efforts
Applying agile principles to drive digital transformation calls for the adoption of agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban at the team level, as well as scaling agile to all levels of the organization with scalable frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and DAD (Disciplined Agile Delivery).
Organizations need a platform that effectively accommodates the diverse needs of multiple stakeholder categories across the organization – including product and program managers, quality assurance (QA) and development, security and operations (DevSecOps), engineering teams, customer and user communities, and support teams. These roles drive the critical elements of digital transformation initiatives and need a collaborative environment to manage value streams, backlogs, application lifecycle, and continuous integration, testing, and delivery (CI, CT, and CD).
Here’s how an enterprise agile planning (EAP) platform can supercharge digital transformation by rationalizing efforts and bringing methods to critical components of modern digital initiatives.
Enable lean mindset
The digital transformation spans multiple functions and comprises cross-team dependencies and handoffs, and communication breakdowns can inject severe delays. Value stream management (VSM) pivots on lean thinking to bring visibility to end-to-end value streams. SAFe portfolios typically contain multiple value streams, each depending on the agile release train, which comprises all the people driving a value stream. An EAP platform can help large organizations gain granular visibility into their value streams, identify sources of delay and bottlenecks, reduce queue lengths, and capture flow metrics of value streams in precision.
This enables a lean mindset that ushers alignment between process, business, and technical knowledge and empowers digital transformation strategy to drive the initiatives to its desired objectives.
Adopt agile methods
Today, digital transformation initiatives are carried out within increasingly smaller timeframes. This is a combined result of the velocity of technological change and rising pressure to deliver value faster to the consumer. This becomes difficult to achieve in large organizations with traditional agile ceremonies like Scrum. When multiple teams are involved, each silo becomes detrimental to the outcomes of a project. Moreover, instead of aligning every employee to the project goals, the objective is to align every team and drive them to a single outcome, as envisioned in the transformation strategy.
EAFs (Enterprise Agile Frameworks) facilitate agility across multi-team programs by synchronizing activities across these teams. The critical outcome EAFs enable is decentralized agile execution against a centralized digital transformation strategy. This is crucial to reducing lead times, achieving transparency, and bringing predictability and improved decision-making.
Ultimately, the organization can capitalize on innovation opportunities without introducing confusion and complexity. EAP platforms help to scale mid-sized and large organizations to execute digital transformation strategies in a decentralized, iterative, and modular fashion with the EAFs framework. This ensures targeted value delivery and on-time project completion.
De-risk products
Over the last few years, the business technology landscape has undergone tectonic shifts. Gone are the days of decade-long technological refresh cycles and annual releases. Organizations operate on agile foundations composed of on-demand cloud, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and temporary container-based workloads. In this environment, mitigating security risks and catching errors early in the application lifecycle is crucial to building secure digital products on time and budget.
TCS DevOps enables faster release cycles and unified development and operations aspects of the software development life cycle (SDLC). DevSecOps, a key value framework of the solution, incorporates security considerations into the foundational stages of the SDLC. In modern digital transformation programs, automated security testing and incorporating security considerations into the product design are crucial to drive sustained value without exposing the organization to security and compliance risks.
An EAP platform can help organizations drive this cross-functional alignment demanded by DevSecOps and empower teams to respond to change while following a plan through automation and iterative development. This ultimately de-risks product development and enables the organization to deliver secure products that respond to the most essential needs of the end users. More frequent deployments are associated with the lowest change fail rates, further strengthening targeted value delivery with minimal iterations.
An EAP platform offers much-needed visibility into the CI/CD pipeline. It enables product owners to decompose epics, features, and user stories effectively and rapidly clear backlogs – frees up teams and pivots their focus to anticipating user needs and innovating products.
EAP benefits
An EAP platform brings an economy-of-scale benefit to large-scale digital transformations. With complete vertical and horizontal transparency, efficient dependency management, and support for scalable, agile frameworks, an EAP enables organizations to realize the outcomes of high-complexity strategies that rely on many teams for their execution.
Here are some of the crucial ways in which an EAP helps organizations achieve better digital transformation outcomes:
- An EAP platform helps the organization ship customer-centric products faster to the market by involving the end-user early in an iterative, continuous delivery framework.
- An EAP platform drives multi-stakeholder collaboration and engagement with complete transparency. This minimizes the resistance to large-scale changes brought on by digital transformation.
- Digital transformation efforts require a certain degree of experimentation. EAP platforms empower organizations with greater adaptability to change, which helps them innovate and respond rapidly to changes – thereby enabling value-focused experimentation.
- Finally, scaling agile to the organizational level enables businesses to realize the complete value of their workforce. It helps team leaders execute digital transformation strategies at peak efficiency, reducing the costs and timeframes associated with the desired outcomes.
Drive modern agility
While digital transformation has gained increasing focus in the boardroom, the term has also become obsolete – primarily because every business now functions in a continuous digital transformation mode.
While the technology landscape is racing, the ability to efficiently execute complex strategies spanning multiple products and programs has become the de facto route to digital transformation success. It is worth recalling that the SDLC underwent the agile revolution precisely due to these factors – namely, the growing complexity of monolithic applications managed by hundreds of developers.
In this era of perpetual transformations, businesses must take a page from the history of software development. An EAP platform will be crucial to facilitate an organization-wide shift to an agile mindset and promote transparency between multiple stakeholders involved in driving modern digital transformation programs. Those who fail to acknowledge the need for enterprise-wide agility for digital transformation success will likely incur losses on their envisioned return on investment (ROI) and fall behind the top performers.
