"Another area we looked at was processes and tools. Again, like most IT shops, we were a bit all over the map, and by that I mean we had lots of processes and lots of tools," Boyles says. "We decided that in order to really be an example of IT excellence we had to standardize and rationalize on those, and to improve - raise the bar in every one of those. So we looked at things like QA, information security, release management, software development, and again put in place a very specific road map. There are some very specific actions and activities and outcomes from each of these areas."
Boyles identified a dozen key processes in IT, including project management, software development, release management, information security, business continuity, disaster recovery and vendor management, and assigned one of the executives on his team responsibility for each. Then as part of the road map the team laid out how IT as a team and each executive individually would ensure AGL excelled in those areas over a period of time. In Boyles's judgment, IT operations seemed to be running pretty well, but were definitely not at best practice. The team decided to put increased focus on the reliability of operations and to aim to reach best practice as a utility company over a period of time, as per available benchmarks.
On the software development side he again took a similar approach to that which had worked so well for ANZ, starting the organization up the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) ladder. The first step was to introduce the Fagan Inspection Process, which Boyles calls "one of the most effective and efficient ways to move an organization up the CMM ladder without even talking about CMM".
Launched by Michael Fagan in 1975, the Fagan Inspection Process is widely used by very knowledgeable people who want to shorten cycle times and reduce bugs in code. Both the ANZ's Bangalore IT shop in India, which made it to CMM Level 5 during Boyles's tenure, and its Investment Bank unit in Melbourne, used TQM and the Fagan process to move up the CMM ladder. As a way of getting everyone using the same processes and ways of doing things, Boyles says, Fagan is very effective, providing immediate benefits in cycle times and quality. Just about every AGL development staff member has now been schooled in the Fagan Inspection Process.
"The thing about IT shops that you rarely see is this sort of really, really long-term focus on identifying what best practice is," Boyles says. "With Fagan and software development we could have said we're going to be CMM Level 5 right out of the chute and we could have done something to get to that. Instead we said we're actually going to get to CMM Level 5, here are the baby steps we're going to take along the way. We made them quite specific, the actions that have been taken to move us in that direction, in the knowledge that if we do these baby steps correctly we'll get there."
However, Boyles also decided AGL needed to adopt a particular process for agile programming. He settled on Scrum, beginning with a project - a marketing initiative - considered hugely important to one of AGL's businesses. "That has worked extraordinarily well," Boyles says. "I have gotten any number of e-mails about the outcome of it, the speed with which it has delivered solutions and the quality of the solutions."
Boyles says Scrum is a personal favourite because it gives a project team the option of adopting an extremely rigorous high-level programmer administration approach to provide strong control mechanisms while still allowing very fast outcomes. And because Scrum teams are composed of business and IT people, and because Scrum allows regular iterations (many people implement Scrum with monthly iterations, Boyles has routinely adopted weekly iterations ever since his time at American Express), it is a powerful force helping to ensure alignment.
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