Opinion: ITIL and Agile (SAFe) as Essentials of Digital Transformation
It’s a common knowledge that Digital Transformation has been for many years taking the position on the top of CIO’s agenda. There are 2 reasons for this: it proves to be extremely beneficial for both business processes and profit and, unfortunately, hard to do correctly due to the absence of a single cohesive Digital Transformation methodology or guidelines (framework). Naturally, each executive knows (or at least desires) what aspects should be transformed in his company, but it often looks like a long journey where a starting point is not very clear defined, so it’s a question how to do this; the perfect metaphor for this situation could be having bricks for building house but not knowing how to mix the cement to hold them together.
Digital Transformation recipe
Having worked in IT consulting for over 15 years, I’ve seen, conducted, managed and heard of numerous digital transformations since the time the trend emerged. Some of them were successful and lasting, some — not quite. This experience helped me to form my opinion on what should be the optimal key elements, this very recipe of Digital Transformation cement. Of course if a traditional shop goes on-line, if a Telecom operator launches an Internet marketplace, these are also examples of Digital Transformation (DT). But if I think about a particular business generally, for me they are ITIL, Agile (SAFe in particular) and automation as much as possible.
I know that Agile and ITIL might seem, on the face of it, just trendy management methodologies, yet if you have a closer look at their guidelines, you’ll see clear difference.
ITIL concerns, in a nutshell, internal and external processes and services, its organization and maintenance. It also places high value on automation as well as team members and human values and concentrates on Change Organizational Management. Methodology solely for IT at first, it was later discovered by other industries, that succeeded in adapting it. ITIL is being constantly improved to better fit the changing technological possibilities and business needs; currently the 4th edition of the framework is being developed. The current version of ITIL contains best practices for Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.
Agile, in its turn, concerns project management and human initiatives, emphasizes the importance of business department and developers collaboration, of self-organized teams and of changing requirements if they can benefit the project. Agile is the open path to DT, but Agile is applicable only in the scale of a team. This is where you need to step the game up and implement Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which is an interactive body of knowledge on how to adapt Agile practices at the whole enterprise and manage global business initiatives. It was Dean Leffingwell, Director and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile, Inc. and an acknowledged leader in software development industry, who largely contributed to its development and popularization.
According to Leffingwell, Agile methodologies are not enough to form a corporate strategy. He explains it this way: “You can’t add up opinions of people to come up with the business strategy. Some things require centralized decision making.”
SAFe, in its turn, establishes an environment where centralized, top-down decision-making works together with independent Agile teams. “SAFe promotes the core values of empowerment and decentralization of control, but not the decentralization of everything,” believes Leffingwell. “The traditional models of centralized program planning and micro-technical-management are a thing of the past with SAFe. That is empowering.”
It is mostly due to the balance between downward control and upward empowerment that SAFe provided such outstanding results many times on practice. According to Leffingwell, business significantly improved productivity and quality (for over 30–50%) and reduced time to market twofold or even threefold.
Case study 1
There are numerous SAFe success cases in the business world, however
John Deere can be ranked among the most significant of them. The struggle they faced could be resolved by increasing their speed to market without increasing budget or amount of resources. So the executives made their choice and adopted SAFE. “Moving our team to Scrum was scary, challenging, and liberating, all at the same time. Scrum was ‘our little secret’ that helped move our delivery time timeframe from 12–18 months to 2–4 weeks. Plus, our engineering teams were happier and customer satisfaction went up,” — remembers Steve Harty, former Agile Release Train Manager at John Deere.
Having organized the working process with SAFe, it’s time to align the corporate vision to DT, and that’s where ITIL enters the game. Actually, the principles of DT and ITIL are very alike: value creation, iterative work, transparency and simplicity; the only thing is they are applied differently. So why not bring them together, merge them?
Case study 2
UK businesses have for a long time been on the path of digital transformation, and I usually like to reference my clients to the British case studies. One prominent and literally life-changing digitalizations was conducted at the NHS Blood and Transplant. This organization is a joint England and Wales Special Health Authority that provides a blood and transplant service to the National Health Service. NHS strived to improve donor communication by utilizing latest digital technologies. According to Gary Dawson, Assistant Director, “It [NHS] needed to modernize a significant percentage of its core systems, platforms and architecture along with re-aligning the infrastructure to more modern cloud-based technologies. The impact on the current business and practices couldn’t be underestimated across the organization — we were anticipating changes in how we work and how the system worked.”
They turned to the consulting agency Ivar Jacobson International (IJI), who designed the transformation framework and guided them through the process. IJI suggested NHSBT use SAFe, and this initiative was approved of. IJI began with providing a two-day workshop, ‘Leading SAFe’ and continued with cross-teams SAFe trainings. Overall, corporate education process took nearly two months. At the same time, the management was working on organizational components, implementing ITIL methodologies.
As a result of a 4 month preparation stage, NHS fully onboarded DT framework and could utilize it freely. The organization experienced various difficulties, for example, with integrating business managers into the teams and defining product owners, but eventually practice made perfect and every challenge was overcome. Yet NHS doesn’t plan on ceasing improvement. “We’re definitely not standing still,” Dawson says. “We are building momentum and will continue to run with the same rhythm that SAFe has provided us with our ODT program. Adopting SAFe has set in motion the skill development and mindset for successful organizational change even as we scale to new programs, release trains, and people.”
Conclusion
As you can see, Digital Transformation can be relatively painless and lasting, if conducted utilizing the suitable instruments — SAFe and ITIL. What you must bear in mind is that neither ITIL nor SAFe can’t be adapted overnight; a CEO can’t one day announce the beginning of Digital Transformation and expect it complete at the next day. DT is preceded by a lengthy and substantial preparation and staff training. To get a clearer idea of how to implement all those changes, it’s a good practice to DT study cases beforehand.
