Don’t Be Afraid … Change!

Over the last several years, my teams have made significant changes to our project management, development, testing and implementation processes and paradigms. We’ve had some bumps along the way and in no way do I consider this evolution over. I will continue to challenge my team members to find a better way to build the mouse trap that drives our software development lifecycle.

Let’s look at some of the successes the teams have had introducing change into the organization:

1. Our project management process used to be split into separate and distinct teams: 1) project management for business and operational teams; 2) project management for technology teams. This has been consolidated into one project management team managing all project related activity across the organization. This has streamlined activity and improved communication across all teams involved in the process.
2. Our lifecycle was revamped as we consolidated the project management organization. During the revamp – we created RACI documentation that clearly outlined 1 owner for each key task/milestone within the overall project activity, along with those that would act in the roles of responsible, consultative and informed parties. This has provided clarity to who owns each activity and what the key tasks are that are included within every project.
3. Recently we made additional changes to the lifecycle – completely eliminating 1 phase and adjusting the tasks and milestones associated with both our scoping and design phases. This has allowed us to streamline the process and give clarity to when project activity actually starts within the organization.
4. We have challenged all of our team members to review the overall standard tasks/milestones within any given project, and challenge the project manager and sponsor to eliminate tasks and standard artifacts when it is justified and where there is minimal risk associated with utilizing an altered process.  This decision then is documented as part of the project and communicated to the team to ensure that down the road, people can review the effort and understand why certain documents or tasks might not have been done. This should allow us to be more nimble and find the best path for each project to take thru the organization.
5. A couple of years ago, it took up to 3 weeks to complete regression testing associated with key functionality within our application silos. This was a manual effort that typically was handled by multiple individuals. The teams have worked hard to automate the regression tests associated with these applications. Today, the execution of these tests can be done in less than 17 hrs. The labor savings moving forward will more than pay for this effort. This also allows us to provide quicker feedback to the development teams and ensures that our regression testing is more consistent across all projects.
6. Recently, the teams also completed the resurrection of standardized test data to be used across our test and development environments. This will be further enhanced as our automated tests are enhanced to create/modify/cleanse and reset data needed for a given test. This will reduce the time spent creating test data for each project and will ensure downstream processes/applications have the data that is needed to execute their regression tests.
7. Over the last several years, our implementation plans have seen significant improvement. Our business demands that our systems be available 24x7x365. When you want to buy a tank of gas at 3AM or 3PM, you want the transaction to go through so that you can continue on your way. You would not find it acceptable for us to deny the transaction because we are updating our systems.  Our implementation processes have been templated and include all implementation activity, across all application and infrastructure silos, commands, scripts, validation and fallback steps in the order they will be executed.  Recently, our external auditors informed me that our implementation plans are among the best that they have ever reviewed. This has hardened our implementation activity – reducing the overall time needed to implement changes into our production environment, standardizing the validation activity during and after implementation activity has occurred and most importantly having fallback steps at the ready when any validation activity shows that there may be an issue.
8. Our development teams have changed their processes to include code reviews of all changes prior to those changes being introduced into our production environment. This is hardening our code base and reducing the risk of making changes within our production environment.
9. Our development teams have changed their processes to ensure that unit tests are created for all code being touched within a project.  These unit tests are then kept in a repository and used in future projects. This, again, has hardened our applications and reduced the overall number of bugs slipping through the process into our quality assurance testing or into our production environment.
10. Our development teams are now doing nightly builds – with reports going back to each team on build failures, unit test execution failures, code coverage and other statistics. This is giving immediate feedback to our development team and ensures that issues are addressed within 24 hours.

These are just some of the changes that have been implemented by the teams over the last several years. And we’re not done! Moving forward, we will move the regression testing into our nightly build process. We will be evaluating further changes to our development lifecycle to reduce the amount of time between idea generation and product introduction into our production environment. We will continue to improve upon our implantation planning. We will introduce key metrics across the development lifecycle. And where it makes sense, we will introduce Agile techniques into the development process.

I talk to college and high school students on a regular basis to discuss what it means to be in the technology field (specifically software development). The one constant that I tell students is that being in this field means you will constantly have to learn. They will learn new languages, they will drive change into the organization, they will experience multiple different development paradigms. All of this is good – it means the organization is alive, is learning and is adapting to its competition. 

Don’t settle for how it works today or with someone telling you, “well, that’s the way we’ve done it for decades!” Your job, no matter what role you play in the organization, is to find a better way, review your suggestion with those that can help implement, trial those changes and then roll them out across the team and the organization. Change is good – don’t settle for the status quo! 

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