International Business Machines Corp. CIO Jeff Smith wants to practice Agile software development and project management at scale, and by scale, he means a company with a headcount that rivals that of Miami.
Mr. Smith arrived at IBM during the middle of 2014, after serving as CEO of Suncorp Business Services, a unit of Australian financial company Suncorp Group Ltd. He led a technology transformation at Suncorp, and worked on the project with tech vendor IBM, which says the effort produced gains in Suncorp’s quality, cycle time and cost structure. So IBM hired him as its new CIO.
Mr. Smith now leads a 20,000-person global IT team at IBM, which creates tools and services for the IBM workforce of about 380,000 people. Few companies operate at that scale, which is nearly as large as the city of Miami, population 418,000. He immediately embarked on an IT transformation for IBM.
“The mission is to have innovation and the speed of small companies .. and see if we can do that at scale,” he said.
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It’s a matter of great urgency for IBM, which is in the midst of a painful transition, the WSJ reported on April 21. “Hardware sales continued their slide in the first quarter as IBM exited the commodity server business and focused instead on its more profitable Unix and mainframe computers,” the WSJ’s Robert McMillan wrote. IBM is betting its future on software and services.
Mr. Smith said his ideas about collaboration and workflow were forged during the financial crisis, during which period, he said, Suncorp was cut off from crucial access to wholesale funding and was days away from going under. He was responsible for leading the development of technology and other business services that helped Suncorp survive a brutal transition.
Now, at IBM, which faces business challenges of its own, he has moved the company away from traditional models of software development. Previously, the company’s IT group was divided into two main branches, a transform, or development group, and a run group. “It was more of the classic way that IT shops are structured,” he said.
There were pockets of IT that used Agile development and DevOps, which break projects into small units, through which small teams move at top speed.
In February, he replaced the old system with 25 domains, each with its own leader. The domains range from a group that develops a cloud environment to a group in charge of the marketplace where IBM employees can download the tools they need.
“The key piece is how to break big problems and use the wealth of people we have around the world,” he said. “The hardest part is to get the raw talent. We have that. The talent and the tooling are there. The way of working is changing. In a nutshell, that is what my mission is.”
He said that his definition of Agile and DevOps is very broad, extending beyond engineering to collaboration and even to the point of how you get talent and skills up to speed. To that end, he rotates people through different jobs every five weeks. “It’s not good enough to be just a tester. You have got to be able to develop a service or an application, or maybe run iteration as a project manager, or be a business analyst,” he said.
Given the size of the organization, teams are expected to be self-directed. The company is too large for a senior person to micromanage. Mr. Smith says his job is to help define the sort of problems that the organization wants to solve, and to establish leadership and systems of accountability. But teams figure out how they go about doing their own work.
It’s one thing to implement Agile processes if everyone on a work force is in one location. “But how do we do distributed Agile, which even the best tech companies had not figured out?” he said. To bring work groups across the globe together, teams maintain open video links on platforms such as Skype all day long.
He also makes use of physical, visual tools such as storyboards. He found that the signs and sticky notes that characterize Agile workspaces work best if they remain in the physical world, not the digital one. After some experimentation, he found that the physical signs gave people a place to go, and that gathering point fostered more group learning.
Mr. Smith’s new structure also is designed to help people get things done. Work is broken into small pieces, but no one gets credit for something that is merely 75% complete. Teams begin the day with a 10 minute standup meeting, during which they run through what they did the previous day and what they plan to do during the current day. There’s a weekly session that looks back at what was accomplished, what worked and what didn’t.
The system is designed to foster accountability. And with that, finally, comes speed.
“That gets to velocity, which is how things get done,” he says.
Date: April 27, 2015