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Agile case studies: How GE, Houghton Mifflin and NYSE drove change Learn how to transition from traditional development processes to agile methodologies

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Agile development methodologies and transparency:

How to reap the benefits

Contents

Hougton Mifflin Case Study: CIO bets on Agile methodology

GE Case Study: A journey from waterfall to Agile practices

NYSE Case Study: Agile development methodologies

To be successful in today’s fast-paced, technical world, it's critical to move where technology is going very quickly, and to do that, you have to have an Agile development environment.

For those not able meet the challenge should be prepared to step aside.

Inside, discover how to successfully change your existing culture to one of transparency and collaboration - and set business processes accordingly.

CIO bets on Agile methodology to drive change at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt By Nicole Laskowski

Brook Colangelo has already made his digital mark. As the former CIO of the

Executive Office of the President (EOP) for the Obama administration, he

pursued open source website-development projects for the WhiteHouse.gov

site, ushered in mobile devices while ushering out desktop computers with

floppy discs, and embarked on such crowdsourcing experiments as We the

People. Colangelo, 35, also shook up the culture in another way: He

leveraged the benefits of an Agile methodology to make sure these

innovations happened fast. That adds up to some serious CIO street cred --

in government, at least.

More kudos could be in the offing. In January, Colangelo became CIO at

Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), taking on another sector in

need of a digital transformation. In this case, he needs to figure out how an

old-guard publishing company that emphasizes textbooks and academic

materials can use technology to change the education process. And he has

to make this happen on the heels of HMH emerging from bankruptcy less a

year ago, after the merger of Houghton Mifflin with Harcourt in 2007. "That is

more than just textbooks and iPads," he said. "It's assessments, it's learning

management platforms, and it's the ability to link all of these things together

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around quality content and use new technology as an enabler to deliver and

improve education."

It's a major undertaking, acknowledges Colangelo, who reports directly to

HMH CEO Linda Zecher. He's still getting settled at the publishing company,

but he already knows that if it's intent on changing how people learn, its IT

group will need to help. IT will be central, he believes, in developing platform-

agnostic content and designing new user experiences for a clientele that

increasingly consumes information, including textbooks, digitally.

"Our content needs to be where the people want it to be -- that's the power of

this consumer economy. We're going where our customers -- students,

parents and educators -- want to see, review, touch and interact with our

content, whether it's in the home, in the classroom or on the move,"

Colangelo said.

"From a CIO perspective," he said," it's how can the technology become

foundational? How can we provide rapid, scalable, elastic services that can

then allow this company to become agile and nimble to deliver what we need

to help transform and disrupt the education system?"

Agile across the board

One way Colangelo intends to help HMH reinvent itself is by applying an

Agile methodology to IT projects and to IT's interactions with the business.

Based on an iterative and incremental approach to development, Agile is

designed to rapidly prototype, review and deliver solutions. In an industry in

the throes of transformation, an adaptive approach to technology is critical.

"Today, Android and iOS are the leading technologies in the mobile space,

but that will change," he said. "What we're building now are systems that can

deliver to this new digital ecosystem in a flexible and scalable manner,

allowing our users to get content on any device they choose."

Colangelo saw the benefits of an Agile methodology firsthand in Washington

when he was CIO at the EOP. "We started using it with a development team

made up of computer-science engineer college majors who came in through

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summer programs, and it was incredibly successful," he said. In just eight

weeks, the group built a whopping 40 applications.

"That's the number you can measure by, but what was even better about this

was the entire user experience," Colangelo said. The students got to sit with

different parts of the White House or the EOP and understand their business

problems. By taking an Agile approach, they were able to develop

applications that alleviated or even eliminated time-consuming tasks.

Moreover, the benefits of an Agile methodology extended well beyond

delivering a product quickly, he said. "It builds a team feeling. The results are

outstanding, the team motivation and morale are through the roof."

Agile methodology is not entirely new to HMH, as Colangelo was happy to

hear during his "listening tour" of the company, but it exists only in pockets.

He is planning to spread that philosophy throughout the IT department. He's

even considering Agile methodology for building a new data center, bringing

important players together in a daily huddle to assess progress and plan the

next step.

IT strategy from every nook and cranny

Collaboration gets to the heart of how Colangelo plans to develop his IT

strategy. "Technology ideas don't just come from the technology team. I

learned that pretty quickly in my last job," he said. "As a leader, you have to

figure out what the priorities are, how to honor those ideas and [how to]

deliver for the users that need them."

Indeed, Colangelo's role in his listening tour's town-hall sessions often

translates into 10 minutes of speaking and 50 minutes of hurried note-taking.

Listening, alone, however, is not enough, he said. A key component is to

listen without prejudice, because the task at hand really requires new ideas.

Colangelo said he's an open book as to how HMH gets there, which could

very well include a cloud-based component, as well as harken back to his

federal government days of open source platforms and even crowdsourcing.

In the next few months, HMH will launch a new website that will radically

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change how customers interact with the company's content. It will take time

to build all the systems that will enable the publisher to meet customers

wherever and whenever they learn, he said, but he's ready.

"I'm incredibly relentless and persistent when it comes to driving change,"

said Colangelo, who attributes that personality trait to working in his parents'

restaurant. Staying in business 40-plus years, he noted, required his parents

to deliver superb customer service and be willing to make whatever changes

were necessary to do that. "I believe in this, and I believe in delivering the

best for my customers; that is what has made me who I am in my career."

GE's journey from waterfall to Agile practices By Christina Torode, News Director

When Paul Rogers said he wanted to replace the traditional waterfall

software development processes in General Electric Co.'s Energy division

with the Agile practice of two-week iterations, the division's business leaders

told him it couldn't be done.

Just one code build within a complex software release for the Energy division

could take as long as 24 hours. Rogers, the newly minted executive manager

of GE's Software Solutions Group (SSG), wanted new builds for customer-

facing Energy software done in 20 minutes.

"With Agile, you choose to do what you can't do, which then makes you have

to change," he said during a presentation at Forrester Research Inc.'s recent

Application Development & Delivery Forum in Boston. "With two-week

iterations, all of a sudden the team started to get very creative with what they

had to use, or the equipment they needed, to accomplish this."

After his presentation, Rogers told SearchCIO.com that Agile has become a

"revolution" at GE, so much so that the vice president of GE Engineering

asked him, "Why can't we introduce Agile across the entire company?"

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That's exactly what he is starting to do, beginning with not only Engineering

but also the other GE business lines that became enamored with Agile

practices after witnessing SSG's success with the Energy division.

Agile practices by the numbers

SSG made significant investments in "software designed to make software

better," said Rogers, who did not disclose a figure for getting his Agile

practices off the ground, a transformation that has taken three years so far.

The technical requirements team, the quality assurance (QA) and quality

control (QC) team, and the developers weren't working together, nor were

they working off of the same test requirements for software builds, Rogers

said. "When I asked QA and QC, 'Why don't you just get together with the

developers?' they said, 'If we give [developers] the tests, they would develop

the code to pass them.' I said, 'Well, isn't that sort of the goal?' That's where

we were -- in a tough spot, with every team executing software development

in a different way."

To get everyone working from the same specs and with the same Agile

methods, Rogers kicked off what would become five "major" reorganizations

of SSG's staff. Estimates of 30% attrition were "overestimated in the press,

but there were some anticipated departures as the new methodology took

hold," he said. Today, SSG has 70 teams of Scrum experts and 800

personnel overall in 113 locations worldwide, all of whom are expected to

take internally developed Agile training and become Agile-certified.

The next step was to develop a new infrastructure platform for SSG that

combined an internally built collaboration system that kept these global

teams in sync, Parasoft Corp.'s code-quality testing software and a

continuous integration platform by Electric Cloud Inc.

"The continuous integration initiative was a big game-changer for us," Rogers

said. "Our method for checking code was all automated and controlled

centrally now. If anything failed, it failed within minutes, versus finding out in

hours or days."

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SSG tested the new agile practices and automated code verification systems

for the demand and management software that large utility companies use.

The build time for the software decreased by 97% from 11 hours to 20

minutes, Rogers said. "That saved us 20 days' worth of time finding errors,

since it could take a month or so to figure out what code or threads of code

was blowing up in a particular integration."

Evangelizing Agile practices

It is well-known that GE doesn't go into a project halfheartedly, as evidenced

by its Six Sigma methodology. A marketing team dedicated to SSG shares its

Agile accomplishments across the business, and recently 165 Agile -- not

energy -- domain experts were hired for SSG. In addition, Six Sigma experts

at GE are being trained and certified in GE's own brand of Agile, and will

share their knowledge based on a curriculum developed within SSG.

Make it your own: That's Rogers' takeaway for others interested in adopting

Agile. One impediment he had to overcome was the argument over what

Agile was and was not. "What it usually came down to was that if someone

didn't like what was being proposed, they said, 'That's not Agile'; but if they

liked what was being proposed, they would say, 'That is agile.'"

To Rogers, Agile focuses on making a business better and its processes

more predictive. He is quick to point out other SSG wins, should there be any

Agile nonbelievers, and he strongly believes that Agile and lean methods

should be combined because "lean is where the money is."

"Combining agile and lean let us exceed productivity [gain] targets by

3,200%," Rogers said. "Fixes that used to take 20 days are done in minutes,

and we have surpassed our goal of tens of thousands of hours in

productivity, saving 650,000 hours in [lost] productivity since we started this

three years ago."

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Agile development methodologies, transparency pay dividends for NYSE By Karen Goulart, Senior Features Writer

Robert Kerner doesn't waste time. The senior vice president and chief digital

officer at New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Euronext believes that in this

fast-paced, technical world, slowing down might as well be stopping. For him,

it's a world that demands Agile development methodologies and

transparency. Those not on board should be prepared to step aside.

"Running a Web shop or a digital shop as a waterfall democracy, you're

going to be swallowed up and lose," Kerner said. "To be successful in this

space, you have to be able to move where technology is going very quickly,

and to do that, we have an Agile development environment."

Agile development methodologies were not the practice of choice in 2009,

when Kerner came to NYSE Euronext, a global security exchanges operator

and maker of trading technologies based in New York. That lack of agility left

the organization's Web presence in a dire state. One of the first things Kerner

did was talk with his team and ask questions.

"A question might have been, 'How do you add a submenu to a menu?' [on

one of our websites], and the developer on the floor told me it's possible, but

it was very difficult to do," Kerner said. "I asked him to show me exactly [how

it was done], and I ended up going through five levels of management before

I got to someone who could track the change. I knew at that moment this

wasn't the way I wanted to run my shop."

What he wanted was the ability to track changes quickly, to react on the fly to

what worked and what didn't. Kerner turned to his CIO, seeking millions of

dollars for a multiyear Web development project – and anticipating mounting

a major defense for his proposal. Instead, he was told "do whatever you

need to do" to get off legacy content management systems (CMS) and

develop new websites to meet internal and external users' needs.

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Prior to Kerner's arrival, NYSE Euronext had already spent significant money

and two years on a Web content management platform that failed to meet

business needs. They were looking for change that worked, and replacing a

longstanding waterfall development model with Agile development

methodologies was a place to start.

Agile methodology meant major culture change

Getting the go-ahead was the easiest part, Kerner said -- far easier than the

cultural change that had to follow. About 100 people, mostly contractors,

were let go.

"It's really difficult to teach a team of that size to think agilely and get the

bureaucracy out of their minds," Kerner said. "I had to change the culture to

one of transparency and collaboration with the business and set the

processes accordingly."

Moving to 100% transparency proved particularly challenging given that

metrics that tracked individual team members' day-to-day progress were

established and displayed publicly.

"For a lot of people, that kind of transparency is too much, so they leave,"

Kerner said. "But I told the business, if they want to look at a line of code,

they're welcome to it. They can look at any level of detail. I have nothing to

hide."

And those who chose to stay? Kerner came to find that they were superstars.

"Only the really best people decide to stay and work in that environment

because they love transparency. They want to show off what they can do,"

Kerner said.

Many happy returns (on investment)

A review of the previous team's process for selecting a new CMS under the

old waterfall method showed it had spent six months and likely plenty of

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money measuring the pros and cons of each system -- and still came to the

wrong decision, he said.

Kerner and his team spent about three days doing due diligence and making

phone calls to select a CMS.

"If I was going to come to the wrong decision, I didn't want to spend that

much time doing it," Kerner said. "We built failure into the plan, so we were

allowed to fail. Failure in an innovative space is a good thing. If you're not

failing, you're not innovating."

A Drupal open source Web content management platform was selected, and

Kerner promised that new capabilities for its Web-based services would be

out in 30 days. In less than a month, a new corporate blogging platform

called Exchanges was up and running. Two months later, new versions of

NYSE Money Sense, a consumer-facing educational website, and NYSE

Connect, a social site for NYSE-listed companies, were overhauled and re-

launched.

"I wanted to continue going linearly, but there was so much pent-up demand

around the business for a Web presence that everybody and their brother

wanted something," Kerner said.

In retrospect, the company might have taken on too much: Kerner admits, if

he had to do it again, he would have gone for an approach emphasizing

linear over exponential growth. Nevertheless, he's pleased with having

successfully re-launched 40 customer-facing and internal sites in a year and

a half.

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