Adopting a continuous improvement approach

Infrastructure Services teams in IT Services have been adopting the University’s new delivery model over the last 6 months. The aim, as with elsewhere in our digital and information services, is to shift towards more agile, user-centred and responsive ways of working, with a stronger focus on continuous improvement, as part of our ongoing digital transformation. 

Infrastructure Services manages many of the critical IT services that staff and students rely on every day, including Wi-Fi, file storage, cloud platforms and managed devices. The nature of this work means balancing operational support, technical dependencies and changing user needs.  

The new delivery model is designed to help teams manage this complexity more effectively, deliver improvements incrementally rather than all in one go, and respond to changing requirements over time. In a practical sense, the focus is on listening to user voice, sharing clear roadmaps for products, services and projects that respond to what users need, and using those roadmaps to inform effective task management and prioritisation. 

What the pilot teams set out to achieve 

During the initial pilots last year, two teams (Cloud and Storage Services, and Managed Desktop and Devices) implemented the new model, adapting elements of it to suit the services they run. They introduced new meeting routines and began using Azure DevOps (ADO) software to manage and track their work in one shared place, making everyone’s work visible to members of the team. This is supporting clearer prioritisation, and helping staff to both plan ahead and to focus on delivering key objectives for service delivery day-to-day. 

The Cloud and Storage Services team is responsible for delivering four core services across the University: data backup, data storage, public cloud storage, and a private cloud platform for use within the University. These services underpin much of the University's day-to-day IT operations, from protecting the data that staff use for research, teaching and learning, and administration, to hosting critical services such as the University's finance and student systems. 

Building on the success of fellow members of Infrastructure Services involved in delivering the University’s Improving Wireless Programme, which has already adopted more agile ways of working, members of the Managed Network Services team responsible for the wired side of our IT networks started transitioning towards a similar approach last summer. This means both areas of Managed Network Services are now operating in a similar way. 

Service teams working differently 

Software to plan and track work 

Teams have begun their journey towards a more agile mode of delivery by using ADO software to manage and track their work. For some, this is the first time the full range of activity has been visible in a single system. Previously, it was spread across various personal task lists and spreadsheets and shared in a more ad hoc way via informal updates. 

Using the ADO board as a shared task list, with in-built prioritisation features, has brought several benefits: 

• All tasks are now recorded and visible to the whole team as a single ‘backlog’ of work that needs doing, which means there is greater transparency across the team. 
• Priorities are more clearly set out, which in turn improves planning. 
• Progress against these priorities can be seen at a glance, through live dashboards. 
• Reporting to stakeholders is simpler and less time-consuming. 

Some initial configuration work was required in some areas. For example, because the Managed Network Services team had specific requirements, they initially needed to reconfigure ADO from the way it had been set up by another team in their area. 

For the Cloud and Storage Services team, adoption of ADO brought different complexities. They were in the critical, final stages of a large-scale platform modernisation project when they started piloting the new ways of working, so the project manager was key to helping them get started. Initially, it took time and care to successfully bring this established project in line with the new model, without disrupting delivery. 

Both teams have found that having all their tasks visible in one place online is a major cultural shift. It has improved transparency but it also means there is lot of new information for team members to absorb, and this has taken some getting used to. 

New routines to support continuous improvement 

As well as starting to use the ADO board, the two teams have introduced new meeting structures (known as ‘ceremonies’ in Agile terminology), to support more regular review and prioritisation of tasks. 

One team has opted to introduce short, daily ‘stand-ups’, using the ADO board to focus discussion on progress and factors that may be blockers. The other team has adapted the frequency of these meetings to suit their operational patterns. Regular planning and review sessions are helping both teams to set more realistic expectations of what can be achieved in a certain timeframe, and to adjust priorities based on what they were learning along the way, in line with a continuous improvement approach. 

Improved ways of working 

While work is ongoing to embed these new ways of working, teams have already reported a number of benefits. These include: 

Improved sense of team identity and alignment – Working from a shared backlog and ADO board has given team members a clearer sense of collective purpose. Everyone can see how their work contributes to shared goals, which helps to strengthen team identity and alignment. 

Expectation management and workload prioritisation – Use of the ADO board allows team members to better understand how much time to allocate for each piece of work. This is helping managers to prioritise tasks, agree realistic delivery expectations with senior stakeholders, and manage workload and task allocation more effectively. 

During the transition to the new Service Delivery Model, I came to understand the capabilities of Azure DevOps. It provides valuable visibility into the team's work, as well as my own tasks, ensuring that anything not tracked in OSM doesn't get overlooked.  As someone new to agile methodology, there was a learning curve and an ongoing process of adaptation, which continues to evolve.

Kamlesh Parmar, Senior Systems Engineer 

Visibility and timesaving – Team members can now see all the work required for a digital service in one place, for the first time. With each task documented in the team’s shared backlog, meeting time is more structured and efficient. Progress is easier to see, which will make stakeholder reporting simpler and less time consuming. 

Templated tasks – The teams are benefiting from access to templated, repeatable tasks, which gives them greater confidence that the appropriate steps are being taken. 

Lessons learnt 

These experiences have highlighted important lessons for teams going through the same transition in future. For example: 

Change takes time 

Adopting a new way of working – particularly if it involves using a new tool – is not a quick process. Benefits are not always immediate. An initial investment of time is required to decide how work should be organised in the new model. Team members also adapt to change at different paces, and for some the process may initially feel overwhelming, so this needs careful and considerate management. 

Adopting new tools 

Implementing tools such as ADO can improve visibility and prioritisation, which ultimately benefits service delivery, but additional resource may be required (particularly at the start) to ensure a smoother transition where new administrative processes are involved.  

Getting the balance right 

Recording each task in a shared backlog helps colleagues to see what everyone’s working on, but it’s important to strike the right balance in the level of detail being documented, so that people don’t feel overwhelmed. 

What’s next in Infrastructure Services? 

The initial pilot phase in Infrastructure Services has concluded. Lessons learnt are being used to inform new delivery model implementation across IT Services.  

In teams involved in this pilot, the focus is shifting from early implementation to embedding and evolving the new ways of working, with a particular focus on incorporating user voice at every stage of service delivery. Although the journey to date has had its challenges, teams agree that the delivery model is beginning to provide clearer visibility, better prioritisation and stronger alignment with what users of these critical services want and expect. With continued support and refinement, the benefits are expected to grow as more teams adopt and embed a similar approach.