When Agile meets SaaS - How to achieve business agility

How to achieve business agility with the right combination of technology and methodology

CSPs face a myriad of challenges when wishing to grow in new segments – it's all about speed, agility and flexibility. They need to innovate much faster and reduce the time from idea to launch of new services. They need to effectively orchestrate a continuously growing ecosystem of partners as they can no longer to produce everything in-house, and they need to quickly scale and expand successful services in the market, and eventually on a global basis. Ultimately, CSPs need to empower the business to adapt to market changes at speed so that they can stay ahead of the curve.

The concepts for achieving business agility through agile methodologies, the adoption of Dev-ops and SaaS delivery models, as well as the use of cloud-native technology have been around for quite a while, yet in reality a lot of projects are still not successfully utilizing them. It's no surprise that a lot of projects feel like running an expedition to Mount Everest. In fact there are quite a few similarities between mountaineering and running IT projects.

When Sir Edmund Hilary climbed Mount Everest in 1953, he needed additional oxygen to reach the summit. This oxygen clearly helped him breathe and perform better in high altitudes but it also came with a cost. With so many people helping to carry equipment, the expedition was significantly slower. This way of climbing a mountain is called expedition style and it's all about using sheer force and manpower to forge your way up a mountain. A lot of idea projects feel very similar. Using complex technology requires large numbers of people and even more are required to manage them to ensure the quality of deliverables. This massive overhead brings a lot of complexity and significantly slows down the delivery process which as a consequence limits your ability to innovate.

But there's another way. People figured out how to reach the summit without additional oxygen, however in order to achieve that you have to be extremely fast and well-trained as you cannot survive for long in the death zone above 8000 meters. This method of mountaineering is known as alpine style and it's all about speed and finesse to quickly climb up and get back to base camp without the overheads of a heavyweight expedition.

We actually need to adopt a similar mindset in IT and avoid the unnecessary overheads that come with large teams working with inflexible methods and technology which ultimately slow you down and increase costs. Instead of an army of people, you want to have the smallest possible team working closely with the business to quickly innovate and deliver solutions in a frictionless way.

The first element to more agility is choosing the right technology that allows you to deliver outcomes with minimal overhead. Clearly, microservices and container-based architectures are key enablers for achieving more flexibility. A big part of this complexity in running a solution at scale resides in the network with storage infrastructure as well as the application or the majority of the non-functional challenges.