Practical Assignment Day 1
Context
Company Zyx has decided to adopt DevOps as it recognizes the critical role technology and information systems have in a modern company to produce fast go to market and facilitate quick learnings.
The CIO was collaborating with the GM to convince the board of directors and other senior officers that this is a key transformation for the whole company and it’s not just another IT’s area project or responsibility as it affects how the company does businesses.
In order to prove that DevOps fulfils its promises, Zyx will follow a gradual approach by selecting one project to start with.
The General Manager has appointed your group with the task of making this project a pivotal stone for a DevOps adoption success in Zyx.
There are three project candidates you’ll have to select from:
• Payroll System Upgrade:
a. The current Zyx payroll system is very old and a long-awaited major upgrade is underway to level it up to expectations and needs. This project has three Scrum teams assigned, each with its own Product Owner, reporting to a Chief Product Owner. The project is currently in Sprint #3 out of 10 planned.
b. Key Sponsors expectations:
i. General Manager “This project will allow Zyx to become more agile processing our payroll, better assuring our employees to get pay on time and accordingly to their efforts and contributions, elevating morale and avoiding impacting our people’s lives. Allowing us at the same time to become more efficient with our valuable resources”
ii. HR Lead “This project has long been delayed, as there were other priorities in the company, until last semester when the system went down just before the bonuses payment round, all the compensation calculations had to be calculated manually, which led to a lot of errors and delays. Due the sensitive nature of the information we couldn’t just hire temporary staff to do it, neither allow just somebody to mess with our payroll data. That generated a lot of burnout to my team and pressure from other executives of the company such as the Sales Director. Now that this project started, is my main priority to make it a success”
• New Board of Directors Dashboard:
a. Zyx Board of Directors was using printed information and some electronic spreadsheets to follow on key metrics, used for decision making and company direction. A fully automated dashboard was proposed by the CIO and got approved and funded. This project has to start in the following months, the CIO has not appointed a team yet, the project vision was led by him and the GM, an external advisor was hired to produce efforts estimation and a general document on KPI’s definition, how and when to calculate them and from which current systems those KPI’s measure will be obtained.
b. Key Sponsors expectations:
i. General Manager
