Practical Assignment Day 1
Context
Company Zyx has decided to adopt DevOps as it recognizes the critical role technology and information systems have in a modern company to produce fast go to market and facilitate quick learnings.
The CIO was collaborating with the GM to convince the board of directors and other senior officers that this is a key transformation for the whole company and it’s not just another IT’s area project or responsibility as it affects how the company does businesses.
In order to prove that DevOps fulfils its promises, Zyx will follow a gradual approach by selecting one project to start with.
The General Manager has appointed your group with the task of making this project a pivotal stone for a DevOps adoption success in Zyx.
There are three project candidates you’ll have to select from:
• Payroll System Upgrade:
a. The current Zyx payroll system is very old and a long-awaited major upgrade is underway to level it up to expectations and needs. This project has three Scrum teams assigned, each with its own Product Owner, reporting to a Chief Product Owner. The project is currently in Sprint #3 out of 10 planned.
b. Key Sponsors expectations:
i. General Manager “This project will allow Zyx to become more agile processing our payroll, better assuring our employees to get pay on time and accordingly to their efforts and contributions, elevating morale and avoiding impacting our people’s lives. Allowing us at the same time to become more efficient with our valuable resources”
ii. HR Lead “This project has long been delayed, as there were other priorities in the company, until last semester when the system went down just before the bonuses payment round, all the compensation calculations had to be calculated manually, which led to a lot of errors and delays. Due the sensitive nature of the information we couldn’t just hire temporary staff to do it, neither allow just somebody to mess with our payroll data. That generated a lot of burnout to my team and pressure from other executives of the company such as the Sales Director. Now that this project started, is my main priority to make it a success”
• New Board of Directors Dashboard:
a. Zyx Board of Directors was using printed information and some electronic spreadsheets to follow on key metrics, used for decision making and company direction. A fully automated dashboard was proposed by the CIO and got approved and funded. This project has to start in the following months, the CIO has not appointed a team yet, the project vision was led by him and the GM, an external advisor was hired to produce efforts estimation and a general document on KPI’s definition, how and when to calculate them and from which current systems those KPI’s measure will be obtained.
b. Key Sponsors expectations:
i. General Manager “We would like to become a modern company; we live in a world were information is a key differentiator in the market. Our decision-making process should be faster and our decisions assertive, the availability, reliability and quality of the information we base our decisions on is of outmost importance for the future of Zyx. I’ll put all my efforts to make this project deliver true value to our company”
ii. CIO “This project is a high visibility one, there’s a lot at stake for my area, as in order to provide availability, reliability and quality, many underpinning legacy systems will be exposed. So, I expect this project will create the base for a digital transformation project that this company desperately needs”
• Help Desk system update
a. The current Help Desk System is a hybrid system that has multiple modules, the main one is call TIKE a commercial system which act as the core, as special needs were being allocated on top of the system several internally developed modules were made. The system is working as expected, but the vendor that produces the commercial system, recently announced it was acquired by its main competitor and the new owner announced the end of life of the product in two years, offering existing customer a full replacement of the software for free by its flagship help desk system ZOLV, if the migration happens within 1 year of this announcement. The CIO approved the migration and appointed the Support Manager to lead that effort.
b. Key Sponsors expectations:
i. CIO “We have evaluated ZOLV and it seems to cover 80% of our existing needs, while at the same time will help us get rid of some custom modules we have developed as the TIKE doesn’t have the capabilities we need. Is not an easy project though as the migration should be planned thoughtfully as we don’t want to impact our ability to support our critical systems users and our team’s highly evaluated image”
ii. Support Manager “This is a key project for my area, we have had reached a maturity state where we are able to deliver on expectations, our team is highly evaluated by its knowledge, serviceability and extremely good manners and willing to help. If the migration does not deliver a system that supports us to do our job it will be CAOS. This will be my top priority for the rest of the year”
Your assignment
1) Your teacher will play the role of the CEO of Zyx.