Scaled Agile Implementation – Lesson Learned, Path Forward

As with many IT organisations within companies started in the last century, Intel IT had a strong legacy of waterfall programme and project management practices, small pockets of agile development teams and emerging DevOps practices with mixed results and limited visibility. Starting in 2019, Intel IT started our path implementing an industry-standard scaled agile framework amidst a broader digital transformation initiative. As we progressed through identifying our development value streams, launching our agile release train teams and then implementation of lean portfolio principles, we have observed and learnt many benefits, as well as the limitations of leveraging a scaled agile framework. The framework allowed our organisation to enhance business transparency, stabilise operations, increase focus on reducing ageing infrastructure and reinvigorate disciplined project execution. While those benefits were impactful, we also encountered challenges in executing large, complex initiatives, obtaining a clear portfolio demand prioritisation, and integrating our operating model with broader corporate processes.

Background

Intel operates a global Supply Chain that is only increasing in complexity due to the more complicated nature of the emerging modular products, our increased reliance on external manufacturers / suppliers and the constraints driven by the pandemic.

The Supply Chain network is spread across 20 countries, engages greater than 16,000 supplier and sources, builds and distributes more than 50,000 unique products

The Information Technology Context

In 2019, the supply chain IT was facing challenges and looking to support the company’s inflight supply chain transformation. The teams have faced reorganisations of the IT department and experienced some workforce reductions that reduced our employee capacity at a time when business demand to the IT organisation was increasing.

The applications and capabilities that support our supply chain business are a mix of enterprise resource planning (ERP), industry-standard platforms and a larger number of custom applications that drive challenges in both IT operational support and project execution velocity and delivery.

IT operations were consistently below the overall, aggregate target service level agreement (SLA) which were only exacerbated by the capacity reductions. In addition, there was a significant number of major incidents which resulted in a large amount of business downtime and impact.

Project execution was also seen as lacking with both large and smaller initiatives missing commitments to the stakeholders. In summary, the operational, project issues in a resource-constrained environment seemed daunting but a new approach was required.

Strategy & Approach to Implement a Scaled Agile Model

The supply chain IT group made the strategic decision to implement a scaled agile framework across the entire organisation. The judgement was made to start our journey leveraging an industry-standard scaled agile framework and implementation model, prior to the full implementation across IT.

The organisation held a week-long planning session in Q1’19 to model and plan the scaled agile implementation and organise around development value streams. These teams are essentially the IT value-delivery structures or scaled agile teams that deliver solutions to the business.

It was determined that we would have 9 scaled agile release teams that support our various supply chain businesses. These scaled agile release teams varied in size from 5-10 agile persistent teams (APT) and approximately 80-120 resources.

Figure 2: Intel Supply Chain IT Operating Model

The supply chain operating model has improved stakeholder goal alignment and execution delivery although we encountered a significant learning curve for both the supply chain business and IT partner organisations.

A fundamental process the scaled agile framework outlines is the integrated quarterly planning process that we execute across the entire portfolio prior to each programme team conducting their localised planning. The portfolio-level planning includes refreshing the business priorities and business outcomes as well as capabilities they would like to be delivered over the next quarter.

The IT teams prepare ‘t-shirt’ sizing of the features to conduct an initial capacity assessment for their teams. The IT teams ensure that they reserve enough capacity to support operational support and any end-of-life (EOL) or technical debt reduction efforts. This pre-programme increment process helps to reinforce the priorities, assess for high-level risk, dependencies, and capacity constraints prior to the team-level planning.

Figure 3: Integrated Portfolio Quarterly Planning

In the Programme Increment quarterly planning events the business representatives assign subjective business value to these items and similarly score the result at the end of quarter when the teams review, consistent with agile principles to demonstrate capabilities delivered.

Benefits

One of the primary benefits of the integrated planning process, and the scaled agile framework generally, is the business transparency and business agility that it provides the IT development teams. Similarly, since the scaled agile teams are focused on the breadth of scope: operational support, EOL-type or technical debt reduction activities as well as new capability, it provides the business teams with significantly improved visibility to the full complement of demand on the IT teams and any associated constraints and potential priority conflicts or trade-offs.

Secondly, with the quarterly planning and prioritisation process coupled with the reserved operational support capacity, we saw significant improvement in the support trends over the last 3 years. The Business Recovery time – which represents the amount of time the business is impacted by downtime – decreased by 75% over that period. Not surprisingly, we observed a commensurate increase in the application availability from 99.38% to 99.75%. Finally, we observed a 45% reduction in Major Incidents related to change management comparing 2020 to 2021. A significant reason behind the improvement of these trends is related to how the scaled agile model provides continued focus on operational support.

The efforts to keep platforms up to date or reduce the application proliferation and complexity is a continual IT challenge. As part of the quarterly planning process and EOL/technical debt roadmap activities, the teams set aside 20% of their capacity to keep platforms up to date and modern. The business representatives have visibility to this capacity allotment towards EOL and it becomes a normal part of the prioritisation process. As teams worked through the initial heavy backlog of technical debt reduction activities, the capacity started to trend down from the initial target of 20%.

As outcomes of this improved focus, we saw improvements in application simplification and security posture across our portfolio and now a continued downward trend in the amount of effort required to maintain updated platforms. The portfolio has a consolidated roadmap that exclusively focuses upon the efforts to retire older platforms or technologies.

Prior to the implementation of the scaled agile process, the supply chain IT teams were frequently missing key project milestones and deliverables. One of the key metrics used across the supply chain portfolio was something termed Programme (or Flow) Predictability. Programme Predictability measures how well scaled agile teams can plan and meet their PI objectives. Over the course of the 3-year period from 2019 to 2021, the teams improved from high 70% to consistently be slightly higher than 100% on average across the portfolio (Figure 4). The benefits were primarily seen on initiatives that were small to medium in terms of scope and complexity.

Figure 4: Programme Execution Improvements

Finally, the scaled agile operating model that was implemented ended up serving as a stabilising construct in the face of 2 significant reorganisations of the IT organisation over that period. The amount of organisational and personal churn and angst was minimised because regardless of the organisational structure – the scaled agile operating model insulated the employees from the change given that their day-to-day activities were largely not impacted.

Challenges

Prioritised Demand Signals

It is challenging to maintain a true ‘1 through N’ prioritisation at the portfolio level. It is more likely during the annual financial planning processes; however, it is much more difficult to maintain as part of the integrated quarterly planning. The portfolio evolved into prioritisation of larger themes and then had the individual domains request investments and cross-prioritise within those smaller sub-portfolios.

Business & Investment Agility

The Corporate Financial Planning Process identified the annual funding level for each initiative for the following year. As a supply chain portfolio, we attempted to adjust funding on a quarterly basis based on project performance, emerging demand, key risks, and budget status (i.e., over/under). While it is possible to gather and present the opportunities to shift investments to maximise value on a quarterly basis, the ability to execute those changes proved more difficult. The challenges were related to a mixture of corporate processes, lack of information and to a degree human nature. Our corporate internal financial processes, ability to have a holistic view on capacity resource planning and the reality that skillsets across teams are not truly fungible in many cases. It is much more likely to be able to ramp up and wind down external resources than shift work to different teams across the supply chain IT organisation.

Large/Complex Programmes

One area where we found the scaled agile framework did not work in our environment was those large, enterprise-level and complex initiatives in terms of either business or technical complexity. For initiatives of this nature, we evolved into a hybrid lifecycle model that proved to be successful. Despite the guidance as part of our quarterly integrated planning process to plan 3 quarters out in time, the teams struggled with the ability to align and execute a coordinated plan. The teams needed to invest in an upfront solution design phase that more thoroughly outlined the business, architectural, and solution to-be state before driving more detailed designs and sending capability demand to the APTs.

Intersection with Corporate Processes

Corporate and executive communication consistently required to ‘translate’ the business outcomes and value from the scaled agile planning and execution into a view that resonated with executive management, financial corporate processes that do not view the world in two-week iterations or quarterly ‘buckets’. They are much more interested in longer-term value, roadmaps and ‘when are you done’ in a multi-year view of the portfolio of initiatives.

Summary

In our supply chain IT experience, implementing a scaled agile framework proved to be an important step to stabilise, and then steadily improve, our operational and project execution efforts.

We experienced increased stakeholder satisfaction due in large measure to the transparency, visibility, and responsiveness related to demand changes over the last 3 years. The consistency in the usage of the operating model and planning across the supply chain IT teams allows for us to enable portfolio-level planning, retrospectives, and subsequent adjustments relatively quickly across such a large organisation.

While we have seen small gains in our ability to improve portfolio-level investment agility – via quarterly investment changes – there continue to be opportunities to determine how we may improve that ability moving forward with a focus on how to maximise business value delivery and maintain our operational excellence.

The most significant challenge encountered during the implementation of the framework required us to adjust to and adopt a hybrid model for the large, complex initiatives that spanned multiple business organisations or where we were landing an entirely new platform. It was critical to fully work through the business transformation and comprehensive and consolidated end-state architecture and design to a certain level before sending demand to the execution teams.

In our experience, the benefits of moving towards a scaled agile operating model far outweighed or overshadowed the costs or challenges; however, with an understanding of those limitations, those challenges can be mitigated.