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Digital Transformation Assignment Question

ABC Company was facing challenges supporting business growth due to technical debt from their legacy waterfall development practices. Their popular e-commerce site was experiencing performance issues and difficulty releasing new features on time. A ground-up rebuild of the site and systems failed to solve these problems. The company recognized the need for change and sought consulting help to transform their digital capabilities.

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EMMANUEL KITHOME
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43 views

Digital Transformation Assignment Question

ABC Company was facing challenges supporting business growth due to technical debt from their legacy waterfall development practices. Their popular e-commerce site was experiencing performance issues and difficulty releasing new features on time. A ground-up rebuild of the site and systems failed to solve these problems. The company recognized the need for change and sought consulting help to transform their digital capabilities.

Uploaded by

EMMANUEL KITHOME
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ABC Company was building their software using traditional waterfall practices.

At the time, they


were generating over $500 million in annual revenue, most of which flowed directly through
their e-commerce website.

The site was seeing 11 million unique visitors per month, delivering over 10 million images, and
handling six million searches per day. This hugely popular site was a 24-7 global cash register
for the ABC company and any site downtime affected revenue instantly.

The customer base included major advertising agencies and companies across the world. Content
delivery had to respond as fast as new worldwide events occurred. Time to market of new
features was critical.

Despite the fact that the company had built a booming e-commerce business, the company found
itself with a technology platform that had accumulated a significant amount of technical debt,
making it difficult to support further business growth. The development process as well as the
underlying code and technology platform were all creating delays in bringing enhancements to
market.

Simply put, the business had outgrown its current processes and technology. Changes were
needed on many fronts if the company were to remain as successful as before.

The company duly embarked on the ambitious task of rebuilding its primary website and all of its
primary back-end processing systems from the ground up. This included the image ingestion
process, controlled vocabulary for tagging images, and the image search engine. This was a
critical undertaking for the company, technically, operationally, and strategically.

When the new site was eventually delivered, its performance was terrible. It was extremely slow
and many of the features did not make sense to end users, leaving the company with a slew of
upset and frustrated customers.

This created the risk of losing both new and existing customers to competing sites. Over the
following months, the company found themselves fixing problems, unable to add any
enhancements to the site that could deliver business value.
As high-profile and important as the site was, the executive team simply had to find a better way
to do things. They could not continue to place their revenue stream at risk by continuing to
develop and maintain the website using processes and technology that were patently not working
for them. They had to step out of their comfort zone, and fast.

Production support costs were skyrocketing. The technical teams were spending long nights and
weekends working to resolve the myriad of issues.

The development teams in particular were bearing a large measure of the pain. With deadlines
looming, they regularly endured working late into the night, only to discover breaking issues in
the final hour that caused management to hold off on the release altogether.

Moreover, after a release, the development team had no insight into customer satisfaction. There
was no feature feedback from either customers or stakeholders during development cycles in this
period. For the development teams, this was like flying while blindfolded.

Planning for development also involved a considerable amount of wasted effort. Development
work was planned using micro-estimation down to the hour by team leads or managers. These
estimates were widely inaccurate, and served little purpose.

• Clients and stakeholders could not get new features into the system in time to meet the
changing demands of their customers or the market

• Production bugs were at an all-time high

• Software releases took weeks to stabilize both before and after launch

Product owners wrote extensive use case scenario documents that didn’t help developers do their
work. And on top of that, people were organized in silos according to organizational structure or
specialization, creating an unnecessary communication barrier between functional teams when
collaborating on a single feature.

In this environment, everyone felt like they were failing. The organization could not get the work
they needed from IT to meet the demands of the business, and the development and technology
services teams worked long hours only to end up with frustrated and unhappy business
stakeholders.

a business owner who wanted features that might take three or four days to develop would have
to wait a minimum of three months to see it materialize on the website. This is because software
releases were scheduled every two months and requirements had to be defined one month before
the release cycle. In effect, this resulted in any feature, regardless of priority, size, or business
value, having a minimum of three months lead time to market. In reality, time-to-market was six
months or more in most cases. This was incredibly demoralizing for staff.

Your task as consultant helping the ABC company in their digital transformation is:

• To provide a SWOT analysis of the current company situation.


• To recommend an appropriate software development life cycle methodology with proper
justification.
• To recommend changes the current organizational structure of the company, ex: which
department needs to be changed first (prioritisations).
• To explain how cloud computing can solve some of the company’s issues.
• To discuss how to reduce the software release time to market while maintaining
highquality standards.

You are expected to write around 1 page for each of the points above.

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