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t Technology Enablement provides clients with a pin-point analysis of their functional challenges.

The leading, independent management consulting firm in South Africa

Introduction In today’s highly competitive environment, companies are constantly seeking better business results. In order to achieve this they aim for:

faster time-to-market for their products; earlier return on investment; better customer satisfaction, and; improved quality of their products.

Agile enables these outcomes when compared with traditional software development approach. The Agile transformation project at TransUnion was no exception. The organisation wanted their teams to go faster, be more productive and produce better quality technology products. Through various discussions with IQ Business the decision was made to adopt the Scrum framework and partner with IQ Business to help TransUnion start their Agile journey. The IQ Business team was appointed to do an initial assessment of organisational readiness, facilitate 2-day Scrum training (Agile Boot camp) for 3 pilot teams and coach these teams in order to embed the Agile principles, practices, tools and techniques with a focus on implementing Scrum as the selected framework. The Client: Background TransUnion offers various product offerings to both consumers and businesses, through several operating divisions: Credit Bureau, Analytic and Decisioning Services and Auto Information Solutions. For consumers, TransUnion provides information resources and helpful tools for a clear understanding of their credit history and financial reputation, and to guard against the theft of personal information and potential fraud. Consumers also rely on this organisation for car value and history reports. For businesses, TransUnion provides powerful analytic and decisioning solutions, backed by professional service and current, comprehensive data for all Southern African businesses. Some highlights of TransUnion South Africa:

It is the largest credit bureau in South Africa that maintains both consumer and business data Through Auto Information Solutions, TransUnion is the country’s leading provider of automotive

information

At the center of the South African economy for more than 100 years

TransUnion Auto Information Solutions maintains more than 13 million individual vehicle profiles

Agile Transformation – TransUnion South Africa

TransUnion, the leading credit bureau in South Africa is constantly looking to maintain its leader position through continuous improvements. The organisation wanted their development teams to improve their time to market, be more productive and improve the quality of the development teams’ work. TransUnion planned to achieve this by replacing their traditional software development methodology with Scrum. In order to achieve the objective, IQ Business, through the Agile service offering (agility@IQ) was tasked with taking 3 of TransUnion’s development teams through an Agile transformation journey.

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t Technology Enablement provides clients with a pin-point analysis of their functional challenges.

The leading, independent management consulting firm in South Africa

Maintains data on 17 million consumers and 3.3 million businesses

More than 36 million consumer payment profiles, updated monthly

Provides access to more than 141 million business profiles worldwide in conjunction with D&B

The Business Challenge

Some of the main challenges which IQ Business team faced at TransUnion were:

Co-location - teams were distributed across multiple areas of the office

Roles - Scrum was a new process for some of the teams and team members had to step into new roles and responsibilities such as Scrum Master and Product Owner

Testing - most of testing efforts were outsourced to a vendor in India

Dedication (100% allocation to projects) - some employees were shared between multiple teams

Business understanding of Agile - most stakeholders and executives were new to the process and some of the concepts were not clear to them (i.e. sprints, stories, story points, velocity and other).

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t Technology Enablement provides clients with a pin-point analysis of their functional challenges.

The leading, independent management consulting firm in South Africa

The Solution

The Agile transformation project for TransUnion took place between October and December 2013 over 3 phases:

1. Initiation (5 days)

Review and assess the current TransUnion project environment in relation to the proposed pilot projects selected to assess the constraints, governance requirements, team structure, infrastructure and other factors which were to be considered in order to tailor the Agile approach most suited to the selected pilot projects.

2. Tailored Agile Boot camp (2 days) Scrum training for 30 attendees with the following key objectives:

To provide an overview of the Agile approach to projects including values, principles and

demystifying the myths

To provide a detailed understanding of the Scrum Framework focusing on roles, ceremonies and

artefacts

To provide a practical walkthrough of the Scrum Framework by using practical exercises to

reinforce the theory learnt

To provide an understanding of how to estimate and plan in an Agile environment

To provide additional learning content covering engineering principles (XP), a brief overview and

application of Kanban, Scaling models and integration with traditional approaches and roles

To workshop requirements and produce working Agile artefacts that would be used in the projects

3. Agile Coaching

Over an 8 week period we assisted teams with their practical implementation of Scrum focusing on the Agile principles, practices, tools and techniques learnt during the Agile boot camp. The objective of this phase was:

To provide guidance and support to team members new to Agile

To work through initial challenges in practice

To facilitate the agile ceremonies such as Sprint Planning, Backlog grooming, Sprint reviews and

retrospectives) in Sprint 1

To coach allocated Scrum Masters and Product Owners during Sprint 1 as well as handover

knowledge during Sprint 2

To ensure adequate handover to the allocated Scrum Masters for each team to ensure that

TransUnion has the necessary skills and knowledge to own the process going forward at the end of

the engagement

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t Technology Enablement provides clients with a pin-point analysis of their functional challenges.

The leading, independent management consulting firm in South Africa

Next Steps / Future Plans

IQ Business recommended the allocation of a skilled Scrum Master with 2-3 years of Agile experience

through contracting engagement, or a permanent hire to help with one of the teams. This will result in better

execution of work during sprints and will speed up development.

We also recommended the implementation of Agile coaching circles. Agile coaching circles are an

opportunity to share experiences within TransUnion and to learn from peers. Coaching circles allow for

spreading learning to avoid making mistakes already made by other teams, and to build stronger teams

through collaboration.

TransUnion will need to continue to educate business on Agile through hosting knowledge sharing sessions

with Business and Executives. This will bring stakeholders closer to the team and improve communication.

Other steps include introduction of Agile to other teams (already running and new).

We also recommended establishing Agile metrics for all teams (such as velocity, burn-down rates, time to

market, cost of delay, etc.). This will assist in the measuring of progress, performance and success.

On conclusion of the initial engagement, TransUnion sent through an additional 16 delegates to further Agile

training to further embed the learnings.

Critical Success Factors

Pre-requisites for a successful agile transformation for teams similar to the TransUnion transformation are

as follows:

The roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner are performed by the right people

The Scrum Master and Product Owner are preferably 100% dedicated to the team and have enough time to perform their roles and responsibilities

The Scrum team is co-located

Members of the development team are dedicated to that team (100% allocated)

The Development team is cross-functional

The Development team has the opportunity in the environment to be self-managed and self-organised

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t Technology Enablement provides clients with a pin-point analysis of their functional challenges.

The leading, independent management consulting firm in South Africa

Results, Value and Benefits

Included in the engagement was a report presented to the sponsor and key stakeholders which represented the key observations, outcomes and recommendations. Some notable results from the report are included below. All teams improved their productivity with one of the teams increasing their average velocity by 78% by the end of coaching.

All teams received positive feedback from stakeholders:

Hi Biase and Pavel Word of thanks to you on this; this kind of feedback was non-existent 6 months ago…and Scrum and your assistance with the adoption of it have played a very large role. Cheers, Donovan Lee

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t Technology Enablement provides clients with a pin-point analysis of their functional challenges.

The leading, independent management consulting firm in South Africa

Some teams were able to complete their sprint commitments for the first time.

And some teams reduced the time they spent in meetings.

Why IQ Business? Founded in 1998, IQ has developed its reputation for helping our clients overcome their challenges. Although proudly South African, our perspective is international through the experience of our people, our clients and our business partners. IQ Business is privately owned and fully empowered with a level 3 BEE certification. IQ – Intelligence. Applied.