How BA uses Agile
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Agile has helped BA's IT department become more adaptable to market changes
The airline’s head of IT delivery Mike Croucher explains how the Agile methodology has helped IT projects to deliver more value, sooner
The airline industry suffered more than many in the fallout from the economic crisis, and the UK’s global carrier, British Airways, did not escape the carnage: its revenues fell 11.1% to £7.5 billion in the 2009 financial year.
That made the ability to identify and exploit new sources of revenue quickly a strategic priority for the company. But as the airline’s head of IT delivery, Mike Croucher, explains below, the IT department’s culture was until two years ago predicated on predictability. Change, he says, was something to be resisted.
To improve the speed with which the IT department could develop systems, and the speed with which those systems delivered their return on investment, Croucher introduced the Agile development methodology.
Put simply, Agile dictates that software development projects are conducted as a series of short iterations, each of which results in live, working code. The idea is to build the functionality that delivers the greatest value as early as possible.
After a false start, BA found that the Agile methodology did indeed help it to conduct development projects in such a way that delivered value sooner. It now uses Agile in around a quarter of its projects, and is keen to expand that proportion.
In fact, BA’s IT department even exported the methodology – or something like it – to the business, setting up Revenue Labs that work in an Agile fashion to develop new ideas for revenue streams.
Here, Croucher explains why Agile was needed at BA, his experiences of implementing it within the company, and what it has delivered so far.
Information Age: What prompted you to introduce the Agile methodology at BA?
Mike Croucher: When I took over development at BA ten years ago, I wanted to drive predictability in development projects. So I put in a very clear ‘waterfall’ technique based on the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process improvement approach. And by doing that, we certainly achieved a very high level of predictability and the organisation was delivering well.
But over the past two years, the IT department has been required to become even more flexible in terms of reacting to changes in market conditions. Even before the economic crisis, we recognised the need to be able to handle change, rather than just be predictable.
The typical waterfall and CMMI method tries to avoid change, through change orders and various change management processes. So we decided to experiment with Agile.
What was happening with your levels of staffing at the time?
Our IT department is based on a four-layer model of personnel: we’ve got a commodity layer, an integration layer, a management layer and a strategy layer to our people.
For many years we’ve outsourced the commodity layer, using global resourcing in places such as India. In the economic crisis, we needed to scale back the size of our IT department so we scaled back those global resources. But that meant we lost the developer skill set.
We wanted to address this by reskilling the analysts who were developers in the past. That was another good reason for adopting Agile.
How did you go about introducing the methodology?
About two years ago, we used Agile on a project developing functionality for our website, with a small team of about seven or eight people.
The project didn’t go exceedingly well for a number of reasons. We certainly weren’t focused enough on business value, and we didn’t get the right customer engagement. We hadn’t changed the mindset of the business to match the culture of Agile so they were still thinking in a more traditional way, even though we were trying to put iterative development in.
We learned a lot from that project about Agile and about how to get the business engagement we needed. At the end of the pilot we decided that Agile was the thing for us but that we hadn’t executed it very well.
Continued...
"In the economic crisis, we needed to scale back the size of our IT department so we scaled back those global resources. But that meant we lost the developer skill set. We wanted to address this by reskilling the analysts who were developers in the past."
I'm really curious why when BA needed to scale back, they chose to scale back the "cheap" commodity global resources rather than what I assume to be the more expensive analyst resources.
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