Agile IT Service Management

Agile Service Management Ian Jones

IT Service Management Team Leader

Suncorp Business Services

Outcomes


• Brief overview of Agile’s Scrum & Lean’s Kanban methodology

• A case study of adopting Scrum and Kanban in IT Service

Management (including Remedy platform)

• Show how Scrum and Kanban enhances

• team work,

• collaboration and

• continuous improvement

• Reference material for further research


Introduction to the case study


Suncorp: Thousands of staff including BT staff across

Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland.

Suncorp IT Service Management team:

10 staff, Brisbane based.

Coordinate Incident, Critical Incident, Problem,

Change and Configuration Management

services.

Challenges appeared from 5 perspectives



Suncorp Service Delivery team:

8 staff, Brisbane based.

Provide a BMC Remedy platform and

services for:

Business Technology

Human Resources

Personal Insurance




Customer

Request

Action

Requirements

Design

Build

UAT

Release

What is Agile?


a group of software development

methodologies based on iterative and

incremental development where requirements

and solutions evolve through collaboration

between self-organising, cross-functional

teams.

Agile vs Waterfall


Agile vs Waterfall


Agile values


Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan



Features or Stories:

Feature: perceived pieces of value

Epic: large pieces of work

Story: small units of work

Task: smallest piece of work

Types of ITSM Features/Stories:

Planned (CSI, BAU)

Unplanned (major incidents, problems)

Sizing

Hours of effort (1 hr, 4 hrs, 8 hrs)

Scales:

Fibonacci (1,2,3,5,8) or (1,2,4,8)

Tee shirt sizes (S, M, L, XL and XXL)


Let’s play

Planning

Poker!

Fixed period of time

(e.g. 1 – 4 weeks),

Start & end dates are fixed,

Stories must be complete,

Quality cannot suffer,

Scope is flexible.


As an application support team,

I need 10 new RFC templates,

So that my team raises RFCs

consistently for our services.

2 2 4 Interpretations

Assumptions

Risks


What I did yesterday was …

What I will do today is ….

The blockers I am facing are ….


To Do In Progress Done

Story 01

Story 02

Story 03

Story 01 Story 02

Story 03

Story 04 Story 02

Tools


ITSM

system

Applications

Defect & Request

system

Burndown


ITSM Burndown

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Days Remaining

Po

ints

Projected Actual

Showcase



• Held on the last day of the sprint

• Team review of the sprint

– What went well

– What didn’t go well

– What still puzzles me

• Corrective actions/Ideas are fed

back into Product Backlog

Sprint retrospectives


Agile vs Waterfall – ITSM tool upgrade


DEC JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC

V

a

l

u

e

Waterfall Agile - Suggested Agile - ITSM Actual

Scaled Agile Framework™ Big Picture

Program Wall


• Department size wall

• Scrum of scrums approach

• Features level, not stories

• Dept wide view of risks

and blockers

• Provides visibility to:

• Senior executive

• Staff

• Visitors

• Guides resource utilisation

Kanban

• Kan (-visual) Ban (-card)

• Toyota’s Just-In-Time manufacturing adopted into Lean Software Development

• Aims to maximise customer value while minimising waste

Core Practices:

1.Visualise the workflow

2.Limit the work in progress

3.Manage the flow of work

4.Make policies explicit

5. Implement feedback loops



Analysis

[4]

Test

[2] Deploy

[1]

Dev

[4] In progress | Done

Queue

[11] In progress | Done In progress | Done In progress | Done

Outcomes from adopting Kanban


• Priorisation by the team

• Maintain a pipeline of work

• Improved visibility of work

• Limiting the work in progress

• Pull vs Push

Result: reducing backlog from 60 to 25 cards

Context Switching exercise


Arabic Numbers Roman Numerals Alphabet

1 I A

2 II B

3 III C

4 IV D

… … …

10 X J

Exercise 1: Time yourself to write down numbers 1 to 10 in rows (Arabic, Roman, Alphabet) Exercise 2: Time yourself to write down numbers 1 to 10 in columns(Arabic, Roman, Alphabet) Compare your times!


Further research


• YouTube: Intro to Scrum in under 10 minutes

(old and new versions)

• Web:

• Scrum http://www.agileforall.com/intro-to-agile/

• SAFe http://scaledagileframework.com

[email protected]

jonesyianau

Prevailing Service Management

http://www.agileforall.com/intro-to-agile/





http://scaledagileframework.com/

http://scaledagileframework.com/