Agile end-to-end?
Date Released:09 Apr 2018
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This is the sixth piece in a series of blogs by Phuah Aik Chong, Astro Chief Technology Officer
In some of my past articles, I have covered the transformation journey we have embarked on, focused quite a bit on Lean Innovation techniques, the adoption of Cloud, active talent management and becoming a data-driven enterprise - all contributing to our digital reinvention .
This article looks at why and how we are adopting Agile to transform not only the way we develop products and services, but how we constantly stay aligned with our customers' desires and also how we remove internal organisational barriers and apply lessons learnt along the way.
Over the past few months, as part of our journey in adopting Agile, we realized that Agile is not just about software development but about being Agile end-to-end. To many people, Agile is simply an iterative software development approach which delivers value earlier than Waterfall, with lower risk, better quality and helps keep development teams and the business aligned, because they work together in the same teams doing things in small iterations. While this alone is a major improvement over traditional Waterfall approaches, there is more... Agile is a mindset change that should influence our overall organisation culture. Agile is not going to be successful if it only takes place in the software engineering team.
Why is Agile important to Astro?
The media industry is probably one of the most disrupted industries in this digital revolution. Product lifecycles are getting shorter, customers are overwhelmed by choices and new players can quickly disrupt established leaders. To survive in this digital era, Astro has to accelerate and stay future proofed by delighting our customers through continuous innovation.
The first reason for adopting Agile is that it improves our focus on Customer Value. By constantly prioritising product or service features based on the value perceived by our customers, we ensure that our products and services stay aligned with their expectations. We measure the value by observing customer behaviours when they are exposed to new features, not using our opinion or even their feedback. If experiments show that the perceived value is low, then the decision to reprioritise features or even cancel them becomes natural. This is why experiments introduced by Lean techniques fit well with Agile. For example, we have seen an increase in video consumption from continuously experimenting with how Video On Demand content is being surfaced and recommended to our customers. This is both on our connected set top box and the Astro Go video streaming product, and we have also been experimenting with different methods for users to sign up to consume our digital products in order to ensure we provide the most frictionless registration journey.
Secondly, as Agile encourages frequent releases of smaller (therefore less complex) batches of work, as opposed to large monolithic releases, the level of risk of each release has reduced and the amount of rework has come down significantly. Moreover, since each Agile iterations include design, build and test activities, defects are identified earlier and the overall quality is improved. For products that have adopted agile development, we are now able to demonstrate them to stakeholders after every 2-week sprint cycle, then have it quickly tested & fixed (if there are any bugs) instead of waiting for multiple months before seeing something at the end of a long process. The DevOps techniques such as continuous integration/continuous deployment and automated testing further enhance the velocity of the engineering team.
Once teams are focusing their efforts on proven customer value and focusing on smaller batches of work, changing course when necessary becomes much easier and this is why Agile enables us to constantly and quickly re-adapt ourselves to changing conditions.
Why is Agile a challenge to Astro?
Moving to Agile has not been that straight forward for us; the fact is, we have been in this business for over 20 years and there are various established processes, legacy technology stacks and skillset constraints that we have had to overcome in order to shift gear.
Changes of this magnitude take time and they are not easy. They require a genuine intent and continuous focus from the senior leadership team. We are fortunate in Astro that we have had the full support of our senior management to drive this initiative and help us to ensure we could transform Astro into an agile, nimble and innovative company.
We now need to shift our business and project management mindset from being timeline focused to customer value focused. Instead of simply holding delivery dates as the main measure of success for a product launch, we need to move towards making sure we deliver the right experience and value to our customers before releasing the product or services to the market. At the end of the day, it is about the customer, not us!
There is often a misconception that Agile will allow us to deliver the same scope of project faster than waterfall. Agile doesn't produce miracles though, it's just a smarter way to prioritise and organise work. Therefore, if a large monolithic team was needed to develop a given product, introducing Agile won't magically enable the same product to be developed by a small Agile team as several smaller teams will be needed instead. Their cooperation and overall alignment with the Astro strategy is key to our success. To achieve this, teams should be loosely coupled which means the way they interact should be based on documented interfaces or engagement models and the work should be distributed among teams in a way that will not create bottlenecks if one team is delayed for some reason. Each team shou
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Agile end-to-end? 
