Blending ITIL, Agile, DevOps and LeanUX at Auto Trader UK

@4ndyHumphrey

The Auto Trader Bit

Our Magazine History

1977 1988 1995 2008 2013

• Online

Our Online History – AutoTrader.co.uk

1996 2002 2010 2011 2015

Our People

PRIVATE Car Sellers

Trade Car Dealers

30,000

15,000

Auto Trader Staff

Product & Tech Teams

850

275

Our Customers

Our Technology Platform

Servers2400

UK Datacentres2

Services switched routinely

Our Technology Platform

1.2 billion page views per month

70 million peak page views per day

15 million unique visitors per month

Supported by 100 live applications

TechnologyArchitecture, Tech

Stack

OrganisationStructure, Culture, Location, Finance

ProductProject Methodology,

Product Design

Service Transition

A process that’s evolving

ITIL Foundation

1

Organise as a Digital

Company

Agile Transformatio

n

Continuous Product

Discovery

32 4

Our ITIL Foundation“What gets measured gets improved”

Peter Drucker

1

Strong Service Management Team

Getting our platform under control

Reporting and measurement

Continuous Improvement

Pragmatic, Focused on Business Value

Our ITIL foundation

Challenges we faced

Started to hit limitations

Too bureaucratic

Safety through control (change freeze?)

Un-scalable

Focussed on process over relationships

Complicated manual

processes

Detailed planning

Extensive approval process

Releases are complicated and costly

Infrequent Releases

Example: Service Transition

BIG BATCH DEATH SPIRAL!

Agile transformation2

What is Agile? - Values

Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools

Working software  over Comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration  over Contract negotiation

Responding to change over Following a plan

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

What is Agile? - Practices

Incrementally Instead of all at once

Effect on Service Transition

More face to face communication

CAB

Change Board (CAB)

Kanban for small changes

Kanban for small changes

More automation of build and test

Less, more oftenSmaller releases - Faster

Release all week

Safer releases – Open the floodgates

Release Team as Go-Betweens

Scaled using Release Team as go-betweens

“Monitoring is a tool for building a relationship between ops, developers and business”

Noah Zucker: https://twitter.com/noahlz

Effects on Release volume / success

FY10 FY11 FY12 FY130

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

Release Volume over Time

Effects on Release volume / success

FY10 FY11 FY12 FY1380.00%

85.00%

90.00%

95.00%

100.00%

Release Success rate over Time

Organize as a Digital Comapany3

till some Organisational Problems

Still some organisational problems

Still some Release Problems

Still some Release Process problems

Re-organization 2013

Product and Technology Teams brought together

Manchester

Spotify Engineering model

Small, multi-disciplinary team

Autonomous

Based around a Purpose

Led by Tech and Product experts

https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/

TRIBE – Audience + Brand

TRIBE – Retail Products TRIBE – Customer Experience

What did that mean for Service Transition?

Focused on Automation

Auto DeployAutomate deployments in Production

Long Automated Release migration

Mar 2014

Apr 2014

Apr 2014

May 2014

May 2014

Jun 2014

Jun 2014

Jun 2014

Jul 2014

Jul 2014

Aug 2014

Aug 2014

Sep 2014

Sep 2014

Sep 2014

Oct 2014

Oct 2014

Nov 2014

Nov 2014

Dec 2014

Dec 2014

Dec 2014

Jan 2015

Jan 2015

Feb 2015

Feb 2015

Mar 2015

Mar 2015

Mar 2015

Apr 2015

Apr 2015

May 2015

May 2015

Jun 2015

Jun 2015

Jun 2015

Jul 2015

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Auto Deployments Manual Deployments

Deployments by week: Auto vs Manual

Changing Release process again

Gradually given Delivery Squads the ability to LIVE release

Start to push Operational responsibility back to Delivery Squads

Our purpose: “To lead Continuous Delivery and innovation of the Auto Trader platform”

Operations teams then Re-organized as Squads.

Effect on our Service Transition Process

FY11 FY12 FY13 FY14 FY15 FY160

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

Release Totals

Overall Success Total Releases

Effect on our Service Transition Process

FY11 FY12 FY13 FY14 FY15 FY1693.0%

94.0%

95.0%

96.0%

97.0%

98.0%

99.0%

Release Success

Impact on working culture

End of Project Culture

End of Contractor Army

Operational and Technical issues highly valued

Improved operational responsibility within Squads

Continuous Product Discovery“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future”

Niels Bohr

4

Still some Organisational Problems

Starting to build the things right… but are we building the right things?

How do we build the right things right?

Product Discovery

Discover which changes add value by iterating designs and experiments with your customers

Change in approach

New Requirements Become Assumptions

We know Becomes We believe

Let’s build it  Becomes Lets test it!

http://www.slideshare.net/jgothelf/better-product-definition-with-lean-ux-and-design-thinking

Data centeredScientificIterative approach

Not just Software - All Business Changes e.g. Process!

Product Discovery – effects on Service Transition

Squads need to prototype and experiment more with their customers

All ideas and decisions are validated with Data

Another step change in the numbers of changes

Needs new levels of of automation and self service

Our Business is continuing to grow and change

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/