HCL Accelerate unifies disjointed product teams at a large software development company

Aligning teams under one group

When a company acquires products, they also acquire the teams, culture, and processes that come with that product. Integrating one previously-established team into a new company can be difficult, and integrating several unique teams is even harder. That’s the challenge an enterprise software company was facing.

The company had acquired several software development products with plans to revitalize them and align them to existing products in their portfolio. Each product had a team of developers, release managers, DevOps engineers, scrum masters, etc, that used their preferred set of tools and processes. Although the products were stable, improvements could be made in key performance indicators like lead time and cycle time. But without consistency in processes or clear visibility into the data being generated from disjointed tools, it was nearly impossible to see where exactly changes needed to be made.

The company’s goal was to bring these newly acquired product teams under a single portfolio, integrate them into the company culture, and facilitate process improvement and sharing of best practices. Since these teams were already established and liked the tools they were working with, the company did not want to “rip and replace” their systems and wanted to give teams the autonomy to choose the tools that best suited them. The company needed a way to get visibility into the DevOps data across these teams while allowing the teams to retain autonomy.

Shifting toward a data-driven approach

The company adopted HCL Accelerate as a value stream management platform across all the product teams in the portfolio. HCL Accelerate is tool-agnostic, meaning it integrates with any tool in a team’s DevOps pipeline, regardless of vendor. HCL Accelerate aggregates the data from these tools into a data lake, then interprets that data through out-of-the-box and customizable reports. HCL Accelerate uses a unique “dots” view to show the status of work items, and has a “swim lanes” view to keep track of work load distribution among individuals. Beyond the dashboard component, HCL Accelerate also provides a layer of governance on releases with automated gates and compliance assessments.

In addition to onboarding HCL Accelerate, the company created a new role across the product teams – value stream manager. This individual was put in charge of organizing and managing value streams across teams, facilitating adoption of HCL Accelerate, and analysing value stream metrics. The value stream manager served a similar role as scrum master, but had accountability and visibility across all teams instead of a single squad.

HCL Accelerate’s implementation enabled a shift in culture and communication for all the teams. Since HCL Accelerate is meant to give visibility across teams and functions, everyone from the development, product, and release teams was given access to HCL Accelerate. At first, the new HCL Accelerate users were sceptical of the tool because the performance metrics it displayed did not always match team assumptions. But upon investigation from the value stream manager, these metrics were confirmed to be accurate and brought to light that the teams had more work to do and more issues to fix than they previously thought.

Better data means better releases

With easy-to-access real-time data from all tools being used in the DevOps pipeline, the company was able to see performance and process improvements across their product teams. Cluttered Jira boards were a big area of improvement. Once all the Jira cards were mapped into HCL Accelerate, it was immediately apparent which cards were out of date, which ones had been ignored for too long, and which ones could be eliminated. HCL Accelerate allowed the teams to identify and fix this prioritization and organizational issue. Now, with more streamlined, up-to-date work item tracking, developers can quickly spot what work needs to be done next and focus their attention on high-priority items.

The automated reporting function of HCL Accelerate has helped these once siloed teams unify, and has helped their new parent company to better support their performance. Since all the DevOps data across the teams lives within a single instance of HCL Accelerate that all individuals can access, there is no mystery around where work stands. Communication and collaboration became easier between teams, functions, and job levels. Developers are now armed with data to support requests for resources, and managers can make decisions based on visibility into live system data instead of hunches. For example, when a team member from one team was moved to another, the team leads were able to clearly measure the data on how that change impacted their team culture and performance in just two sprints.

Another benefit the organization gained was from HCL Accelerate reports saving time. Product managers on these teams used to spend two hours or more manually gathering data, taking screenshots, and requesting info from team members to prepare for weekly status update meetings. Since all this information was gathered at a single point in time, their report would be outdated by the time the meeting happened. Now, product managers spend 5 minutes generating an automated report from HCL Accelerate, and the report’s content can be customized to their specific needs.

Best of all, many of the teams involved in implementing HCL Accelerate saw improvements in build success rates, build time, and build quality. The company hadn’t sought to improve these metrics specifically because they didn’t know there was a problem with these values to begin with. But once HCL Accelerate united the disjointed teams and data, it brought to light exactly what needed to be fixed. Based on the data from HCL Accelerate, the company reallocated resources and adjusted processes to allow for improved flow with stabilized lead time and throughput; more automation to get faster and more reliable builds; and better security practices that led to better data for release readiness.

As the company acquires more software tools, HCL Accelerate will be an integral part of understanding and aligning performance and processes.