Facing the Challenge Head On

Disrupting Our Own Industry Part III

For all the ambiguity and uncertainty that Covid has brought, it has done two things right. One, It has forced business leaders to think long and hard about what matters most. Two, it has enabled creative innovation and experimentation like never before, because today there’s no right or wrong, because ensuring business continuity is the only goal. And that’s exactly what happened with us. 

In the last part of this blog series, we spoke about how we tweaked our E2E delivery aurOps model used for customers in order to streamline internal operations. None of it was easy, of course, and we had to take it one step at a time. 

This journey began in mid March and by the end of the month, we had the following things ready: 

• A disciplined team who were updating all tasks diligently and were well versed with the agile methodologies we follow
• A DevOps platform with the right processes, tools and frameworks integrated with each other to help deliver solutions faster, better and more efficiently. 

The Challenges:

● Socialization: Getting the team used to the aurOps platform was the most difficult. To achieve this without too much back and forth, we created a platform onboarding template that had all the essentials of how to use the platform, key-stroke steps and links to access the platform. This ensured that the team had a manual-of-sorts and reading material to operate the platform with proper assistance. 

● Requirement Analysis: In order to keep all team members on the same page, we asked them to document their specific requirements in detail, since remote working created a lot of confusion otherwise. We customised the platform to introduce centralized requirements, user-story templates and automated data led features. These templates, when pushed to aurOps platform, create the corresponding user stories for team members to directly work upon. This also enabled teams to work with the Requirement Traceability Matrix, making it more seamless for their leads to manage! 

● UI / UX Understanding: Dashboards like Project Reports, WSR / DSR, QA Reports and Agile Metrics were developed by testing with a smaller set of beta customers; hence lacked the accessibility for the team. With our teams using these, feedback came directly from the end customers, including developers, team leads, scrum masters, QA leads and project managers, which helped us further revise the customer experience of the dashboard and make it more user friendly!

● Various Projects with multiple technology stacks: Multiple teams worked on various projects that required different technologies like Angular.js, Node,js, React.js, Android, iOS, Java stack, etc. Not everyone had the knowledge for each and every language, and different projects were utilizing them on a specific need basis. However, these projects were also interlinked. To achieve flexibility in the platform as well as better technology coverage, we had to think about various technology and toolchain collaborations with ready to use DevOps assembly lines. We set these collaborations up in order to make the platform airtight and avoid any coding errors. 

We rolled out our aurOps platform last week of March 2020 and onboarded 40% of the projects within the organization. It has been almost a month of this implementation, and the success of it is absolutely amazing!

In the final part of this blog, I will talk about how it has created massive impact for us and helped business stability in these tumultuous times. Stay tuned for more!