Recently, I had a fascinating conversation with my old friend Joe–the name has been changed but the conversation is real and unedited–an IT Infrastructure program manager from a large IT service provider.
After a bit of chit-chat on weather and football, we started talking about infrastructure in a typical large enterprise.
Joe: I am not sure how agile applies to infra space, I can understand it works well for software development, but not in IT Infra space.
Me: OK, why do you think so?
Joe: Well, we have lots of coupling between components, infra projects tend to be big migration or upgrade moves and highly risky. I know many large enterprises in Europe that we work for and many of them haven’t looked at agile in the infra space.
Forty minutes and couple of beers later…
Joe: I have to send four reports every Friday afternoon on status, risks, issues.
Me: Why do you need so many reports?
Joe: I can’t share all the same info to the client that I share internally. There are some risks that we manage internally. My client wants the info on Jira and confluence. My regional manager wants it on an internal tool (some five-word acronym that I forget!). My account manager wants it as a PPT, as this is an important account and he says this needs to be tracked closely. My global manager wants it on a different tool, inherited from a previous merger as my employer was recently acquired by another service provider.
Basically, most of my Friday is spent copy pasting information across these reports. Then I spend most of Mondays reconciling the numbers and responding to follow-on queries, and Tuesdays justifying the cost of resources, change in resource costs because many projects are usually in Amber or Red. I think it usually works well if I have a good PMO.
Me: How many people do you have on the current programme?
Joe: We have four PMs and seven infra resources on this infra upgrade and migration programme. There is a different provider who looks at the application changes and they have a team of managers and developers etc. The seven infra resources I referred to are also busy with BAU work.
Me: So, you have seven part time infra people who are the actual doers, one programme manager, four PMs and PMO, client side vendor manager(s) and you are running half a dozen projects.
Joe: Yes, as you can see, we can’t be agile in infra.
Me: Why do you need projects? And, why do you need so many of them?
Joe: What? No projects? Surely, that’s how it is always done! How do we ensure control, governance?
