CASE STUDY: Accenture
Key Accenture Learnings on Scaled and Distributed Agile Delivery
Accenture is a $30 billion global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 336,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, named by Fortune magazine as one of the top 100 companies to work for from 2009-2015. As part of their effort to accelerate software delivery, Accenture has adopted Agile and DevOps on a large scale across its Global Delivery Network, leveraging the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) with a range of tools. In addition, Accenture helps its clients successfully shift to Agile development using SAFe along with DevOps to drive high performance.
In the provided case study, Accenture shares its insights on addressing process, organization, and tool challenges, including:
- Solution misalignment between teams
- Integration of Agile with Waterfall
- Different timezones, customs, and cross-team activities
- Different DevOps tools between teams
As many companies struggle to implement Agile at scale in distributed environments, this case study describes Accenture’s experience enabling faster delivery and speed-to-market by implementing Agile programs using SAFe, along with adoption of DevOps principles. The early benefits are compelling:
Early Quantitative Benefits
- 50% improvement in merge and retrofit (based on the actual effort tracked)
- 63% improvement in software configuration management (effort to support SCM activities)
- 59% improvement in quality costs (percentage of defects attributed to SCM and deployment)
- 90% improvement in build and deployment (process and effort to raise deployment requests)
“Enhanced SAFe processes are key to attaining solution alignment between different scrum teams.”
“SAFe is critical to the alignment of delivery timelines.”
Early Qualitative Benefits
- Improved demand management and traceability from portfolio through to Agile delivery teams
- Granular configuration management and traceability
- Integration with Agile life cycle tools to allow story-based, configuration management driven from meta data
- Real-time traceability of status for build and deployment
- Automated build and deployments, including “one-button deployment”
- Developer efficiencies as a consequence of improved tool interaction times and processes
Many thanks to Accenture’s Mirco Hering, APAC lead for DevOps and Agile, Andrew Ball, senior manager, and Ajay Nair, APAC Agile lead for Accenture Digital, for taking the time to share their insights and learnings. Their story is an inspiration to all of us in the SAFe community.
