Agile IT Infrastructure Transformation : A Case Study of a Nordic Incumbent Telco

Abstract: In a growing digital economy, where demands for network services and competition from various communication-over-the-network service providers intensify, telecommunication companies need to keep up in an ever-changing environment. As there is a need to reduce time-to-market for new network services, agility becomes restrained by having to operate within large legacy IT infrastructure environments. While agile methodologies in modern time have attained recognition in the field of software development for the way they help to manage changing customer demands and deliver early value incontinuous increments, it is yet uncertain how agile methodologies can best be adopted for IT infrastructure deliveries to achieve the same purpose. Hence, this study explores how legacy IT infrastructure can be transformed in an agile way into modernized infrastructure landscapes supporting the business with fast enough development, release and deployment of new network services in demand. More precisely, the study investigates how larger IT infrastructure transformation projects can be executed by the help of agile practices. In order to investigate this, the study carries out a case study at Telia Company, a large Nordic incumbent telecommunications company possessing a big legacy of IT infrastructure. The study conducts internal interviews with Telia employees as well as external interviews with agile experts. Also, benchmarking is conducted with a well-established Swedish bank to better understand the challenges and how agile practices can best be applied.The study concludes that agile practices influenced by agile frameworks Scrum and Kanban can advantageously be applied at team level for more agile execution. However, the surrounding organizational business landscape greatly sets the limits for agile deliveries, due to dependencies on cooperation from the business side in the execution phase and the need to be aligned with business needs and stakeholder requirements. Further, the study also shows that the application of agile practices at team level in combination with a close dialogue with stakeholders and a scaled agile approach requiring investing in automation, is the key for more agile infrastructure deliveries. In this way, aligned end-to-end delivery processescan be better developed and infrastructure needs better understood and implemented at the right time. As a contribution, the study proposes a model with inspiration from agile frameworks Scrum, Kanban and SAFe, for how this may work in practice.