Highlights
- The year was 2017 and it was business as usual at a TCS office in Mumbai. In one of the conference rooms, our CEO, senior business leaders, and our agile experts were deep in discussion. “We see an increasing agile adoption by our clients, and we need to know what’s getting them excited about it, and why,” the CEO said. The statement was directed at the agile experts and very soon, it would change the way TCS approached work.
- The agile team with the help of one of the business units planned a real-time demonstration of the agile way of working and its benefits. Their challenge was to create a TCS offering by applying the agile methodology. The group organized itself into self-managed scrum teams. Over the next three days, the agile experts guided the scrum teams into planning product backlogs with minimum viable products (MVPs), drawing out Kanbans, listing dependencies, and advancing in short, swift bursts. At the end of it all, an offering was born. It took all of three days for an outcome that would otherwise have taken three months. Agile functions on the simple truth that time is a non-renewable resource, and with the core premise that the marketplace is in a continual state of disruption and waits for no one.
- Those three days set the stage for a journey that would be completed over the next three years – TCS’ vision of becoming Enterprise Agile by 2020. And here we are today – the largest agile-ready workforce in the world. As of April 2022, 545,451 of us across the globe function as #OneTCS, working and living agile. This is our agile transformation story.
Insights in this article
Why enterprise agile?
Agile has primarily found use as an operating model toward hastening the speed-to-value of deliveries in information technology. We, however, saw opportunity in the role it could play to elevate us as an organization. At the end of the day, products and services require human intervention. Many of these interventions come from enterprise-wide functions such as legal, marketing, and finance. The need to absorb agile into the enterprise as a whole was part of our reimagination of the value stream across the organization such that it moved from concept to the customer rapidly.
In 2017, TCS also put forth the Business 4.0™ framework, designed to help companies with their digital business transformations. Agile, as one of the core pillars of this framework, enabled enterprises to embrace risk thanks to its iterative approach and fail-fast philosophy. This ability to embrace risk in turn reinforced other Business 4.0 behaviors such as the ability to leverage ecosystems and develop more audacious business models to create exponential value.
It is through the lens of Business 4.0 that TCS recognized the potential of Enterprise Agile – the ability to apply agile not only to IT development, but also as a working methodology that the entire organization could adopt.
Agents of change
The first step towards meeting this wider goal was to identify the areas that needed agility. The first wave of the transformation covered IT services across all industry units. The second wave encompassed Cognitive Business Operations, comprising Business Process Services and IT Infrastructure Services. And because no enterprise endeavor can be successful if it leaves out core organizational support functions, the third wave saw the transformation of enablement functions such as HR, Marketing, Administration, IT Infrastructure, Delivery Excellence, Internal IT, and Research.
This transformation was led by the Agile Initiative Network, an internal body of experts designed to evangelize agile as a work methodology across TCS. Today, this network comprises agile ninja coaches, who in turn groom agile practitioners, who implement the agile way of working in their projects. As of April 2022, TCS has 2,512 ninja coaches.
Agile every day
We introduced the concept of Living Agile™, which focuses on adopting agile as a lifestyle via mini projects that are short (a maximum of three days) and experiential. Agile coaches help learner groups break down a real-world problem and work in sprints as scrum teams to meet their goals. The intent is: to shatter legacy-led cultural mindsets about work and instead see it as iterative value-building; to think of a team with no leadership hierarchy; to foster fast learning; to embrace risk; and, most importantly, to keep pushing the envelope on problem-solving. Agility is contextualized as a way of life because agile principles can be applied to all challenges – be it to help your child ace their math assignments, to help you train for a marathon, or to help a client migrate to the cloud with no breaks in business.
The outcome of such real-time mini projects is behavioral transformation in a short span of time. The idea behind Living Agile is to internalize agility; to ‘do and learn’, as opposed to the traditional approach of ‘learn theory, then do’.
Location-independent Agile™
2020 was not just a gamechanger, but a life-changer for industries, businesses, and people alike, the world over. The COVID-19 pandemic led us to momentarily believe that our internal goal of reaching enterprise-wide agility might have to be reset. So much was changing on a daily basis that it was only logical that we push forward our target. But the beauty of the agile process is that at some level it starts to develop organically.
Two years prior, we had worked on the concept of Location-independent Agile (LIA) to further the idea that agility doesn’t require the physical co-location of teams for cross-functional collaboration. It wasn’t an idea that was easy to promote because, typically, agility pushes for collaboration within a physical setting. But LIA underlines agility and the harnessing of a global abundance of talent. It facilitates a structured geographical working model of agile team members by design, instead of a random spread. So, agility is not compromised even when people are not co-located.
When the pandemic forced everyone to work remotely, it was LIA that helped us seamlessly migrate to working as a borderless enterprise. LIA dovetailed perfectly with the Secure Borderless Workspaces™ (SBWS™) framework, which details our new operating model for the future.
Where do we go from here?
Today, industry agile experts and analysts acknowledge TCS’ leadership in this sphere. We handle over 6,532 active agile IT engagements and 11,633 active agile IT projects. We have also added to the worldwide agile vocabulary by introducing the concept of Agility Debt™, a unique and exclusive index that measures an organization’s agility. The lower the debt, the higher the agility.
We would now like to take enterprise agility industry-wide and to world standards bodies – to have with them the same conversation we had among ourselves in that conference room back in 2017.
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