In evaluating most catalytic events, it’s not so much what happens that matters; it’s what happens next. Business requires the power of IT to influence customer experience, support changing business models and develop new efficiencies. We have experienced these truths:
- Motivated IT teams often prefer grass-roots solutions and creativity over heavy top-down mandates.
- Orchestrating the diverse perspectives, processes, tooling and contributions across IT teams is a laudable aspiration and a continuous challenge.
- Software professionals love to think big while searching for the smallest, smartest changes to deliver desired results.
With 84,000 employees in 3,000 brick-and-mortar stores contributing to the success of the SPAR Austria brand, increasing competition from native on-line retailers was the catalyst that dramatically increased the pressure on SPAR to succeed. To accelerate its transformation, SPAR’s Information and Communication Systems group turned to Enterprise Studio by HCL to assess automation opportunities and provide enterprise agile coaching.
SPAR asked Enterprise Studio to “automate everything” in the shift to agile. Over time, with numerous sprints and PIs, Enterprise Studio helped implement a fully integrated development factory, embracing the grass-roots strengths of IT with all teams working in unison to become more responsive to business needs.
What happened next?
SPAR e-Commerce shops moved from error-prone, chaotic, manual efforts towards streamlined software development, a 100% increase in release frequency, a 99% reduction in deployment time, and near-zero error rates. Today, SPAR rolls out high-quality feature-toggle releases, provisions in-house IaaS systems on-demand, and releases hot fixes with zero downtime to production.
Starting with a catalytic event—great pressure on IT and big ambitions—SPAR combined small steps toward agile and DevOps with a collaborative client/vendor approach to achieve more creativity, greater innovation and better engagement between IT and business stakeholders.
