Agile Computing: Internal or Sourced - or Is That The Wrong Question?

Interview with Chris Murphy, Program Director at Mindtree (Agile Center of Excellence in Gainesville, FL)

Agile Computing is increasingly becoming a component of Application Development and Testing sourcing agreements. Agile is a significantly different delivery model from the "Waterfall" approach most commonly utilized in outsourced application development services. Last week, I caught up with Chris Murphy at Mindtree to discuss Mindtree’s approach to Agile Computing. Chris was very helpful in articulating the practicalities around Agile in sourcing agreements.

Bill Huber: Tell me about your background and current responsibilities.

Chris Murphy: My role is the Program Director for the Mindtree Agile Center of Excellence at the Gainesville delivery center. I have 25 years of IT and It Development experience. At Mindtree, we focus on Travel and Transportation, High Tech, Retail and Business Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI). I focus my time on discussing Agile and DevOps which includes the central Agile Center of Excellence (ACoE), automation testing services, Information Management and Testing Services (IMTS), and with the central operations team, we provide end-to-end solutions to our customers. Our DevOps offering includes Agile, necessary architecture to support an operations team that supports development and cloud ops.

BH: What does “Agile” mean to you?

CM: Agile is a cultural shift within an organization, a paradigm shift in how we do things--in order to support our clients and our clients’ clients. The Millenials are coming of age and expect things to be developed quickly and work the way that they want. The delivery shift enables delivery at higher quality and faster time to market. In the past, much development was done that was never used. There was never any crowd sourcing. Developers need to deliver quickly or clients will go elsewhere. It is a unique time that we are in that requires a lot more attention to doing the right things quickly, and that is where Agile comes into play. Call it a buffer or a backlog, so that you prioritize to not do things that do not have a high value. The continuous collaboration between IT and the business allows delivery of the right software very quickly. When people hear Agile, the first thing they think of is scrum, but there is more. Agile allows introduction of buffers to deliver high quality and high value.

BH: Many clients perceive Agile as a retained function, but clearly this is an important activity for Mindtree. What are the advantages of using a provider for Agile work?

CM: It’s helpful to use a skiing analogy. Skiing is easy to learn and difficult to master. The same applies to “Agile”. How the Agile manifesto is interpreted is often in the minds of the reader. Clients start down the Agile path and then life and work kick in. Clients often revert back to what they are most comfortable with, which most often is waterfall. It’s important when going down this path to have someone who has done this multiple times with multiple clients so that you don’t revert. An Agile coach is there to ensure that you go down the path directly. Agile, at its core, is a cultural change within an organization, which is difficult to foster. It requires doing things that might seem uncomfortable at first. It involves overcoming the concept of centralized control. Centralized control is often an illusion. Much day to day activity needs to be decentralized and taken down to the team who is closest to the business, allowing self-organization and self-motivation. Each Agile Team is really an innovation belt -- small entrepreneurial groups that are writing code to build something bigger for the organization. This fosters the “intrapreneurial” spirit within an organization. Companies often don’t get the full benefit of Agile. A provider provides that support mechanism to keep a client down this path.
The whole point is to train the client and embed our teams with the client teams. The client will learn and emulate and then pull back. Part of our transformation offering is to reign back the team and apply lighter coaching as maturity increases. Self-sufficiency is important.

In working with our clients, our transformation team will:

• Minimize disruptions (Agile can be scary) – 2-3 week assessment and roadmap
• Mitigate risk
• Keep an eye on self-sufficiency for the clients
• Understand the organization, and then help them to roll it out over time.
• When organizations get to the point of self-sufficiency, they still have the coach come in once a quarter.

For us, Agile and the concept of servant leadership are joined. IF we do the job well, transformation will occur and the client will see benefits both personally and professionally. Agile is a journey, and not a destination. If you look at what was Agile ten years ago and what it is now, Kaizen and the concept of continuous improvement is embedded in the Agile culture.

Look at test vs. development: Scalable pods is where Mindtree does the delivery. All organizations will need to get to the point of core competency. No matter how much they try, some clients will never be good at it. Clients were surprised at what Mindtree could do in terms of putting together working software quickly vs. a PowerPoint. This is all part of our agile culture -- prototypes and working software.

BH: How is contracting different for Agile?

CM: There are a few things that are different. The whole paradigm in waterfall is fixing the scope and varying the time and cost. In the Agile world, we fix the time and the cost, and vary the scope. We deliver the things that are most important to the client, up to the budget limit. The way that we measure is very different. In waterfall, you think about function points. In Agile we talk about storyboards. The contracts tend to be different. In the beginning, the duration of a typical Agile engagement was short, but the duration is getting longer, as clients see the benefits of maintaining these teams over a longer period of time.

BH: Thank you Chris! It seems that we will continue to see evolution of Agile in the future. We’ll check back in for an update.