In every way, shape and form
A day in the life of... the EOL project
EOL stands
for Enterprise Online. The project started early 2017 as part of Vodafone
Group’s request to revamp its portal for business solutions. Since then,
Celfocus has established a trustworthy relationship with the client, working
together as a single team for BAU activities.
If you are a
curious person (like me), you might like to check the websites in context:
- Vodafone Group – Enterprise: https://www.vodafone.com/business/home
- Vodafone UK Enterprise: https://www.vodafone.co.uk/business
- Future Ready Advisor: https://www.vodafone.co.uk/business/future-ready-a
We will talk a little bit more on the last one on a further topic “Future Ready Advisor score”…
Agile team on the ground
This project follows an agile approach from a delivery perspective, which means that they have a team that delivers value to the business every three weeks (3-week sprint cycle into production).
From the role’s perspective, the Celfocus team is divided by:
- Front end: Isabel Chambel
- Development: working from Lisbon (AD team) and Oporto (AMO team)
- Pedro Xavier
- José Lopes (AMO)
- João Manuel Santos (AMO)
- Isaac Silvério
- Filipe Freitas Lobo
- Mariana Liberato
- David Carvalho
- Celso Clemente (AMO)
- Quality Assurance: Guilherme Maia and Ana Rosa (Test Manager)
- Architect: Bernardo Pinto;
- Scrum Master: Margarida Janeiro
On the Vodafone side, there’s one person that defines and aligns the user stories (Noelia) with Celfocus.
Onsite, there is 1 person from the Quality Assurance BU (Ana Rosa Costa), guaranteeing alignment with the client from a testing perspective.
Image 1: EOL Workshop, October 2019 in Lisbon
A normal daily scrum
The day started with a call at 9AM between the SM and IT Vodafone Group for daily alignment. Normally a quick call to unblock a few challenges / questions, followed by a team meeting to share an update on the respective daily activities (activities from yesterday and the plans for the day).
I could notice the team’s comfort and dynamism when following this approach. This guarantees alignment and helps solve some unexpected surprises that might occur during the daily activities. This is a must have when delivering Agile projects due to the short development period.
After the alignment meeting, there was again a call between the SM and Vodafone business for the same purpose.
Hands on the code and time to produce!
After lunch, it was time for User Story estimation. The dev team sat together to estimate the next set of User Stories. During this meeting, I learned a different way to estimate the backlog, using the RCT method, which stands for Risk/Complexity/Time, considering 1 (lowest score) up to 5 (highest score).
The sum of the classification given by each team, results in the total effort for a User Story: The Story Points. The same are linked to the needed effort to deliver it (front end, backend and testing).
Image 2: User Story estimation
Below you can
find an example of 3-week a sprint cycle:
Vodafone Group Roadmap - BAU
Due to the relationship established with the Vodafone Group, Celfocus was invited to suggest a roadmap for the upcoming months concerning both the Business and IT Units. Having gathered all the information, Celfocus shared a common roadmap for Vodafone Group. The result can be seen on the next pictures:
The following two projects were awarded to Celfocus within
the EOL project context
1.Enterprise Digital readiness score
With the goal of capturing more leads on the enterprise customers side, Vodafone developed a process to calculate an accurate digital readiness score (Future Ready Advisor), for a user that wants to subscribe to Vodafone business Solutions. This will result on a lead for Vodafone with a certain score. The user must answer a set of questions (Watson instantiated questions) and based on the results, and on the company's digital readiness, a score and a set of solutions is provided to the business User. Later on a sales representative will contact the customer, with a more detailed idea of what the company needs to be digital and future ready.
The solution was built by Celfocus on top of Watson. Watson is an IBM’s suite for enterprise-ready AI services, applications and tooling: https://www.ibm.com/watson/with-watson/.
Image 5: Watson – Enterprise Readiness Score
2.Oracle Cloud Migration project
Did you know that in between of BAU activities, Celfocus also won a project for the VDF Group named: Oracle Cloud Migration Project?
The scope was in anyway “closed”. However, the delivery methodology was the same: Agile.
EOL is already instantiated in Oracle Cloud Gen1 and now the project is going to migrate to Gen2. This will allow EOL's CMS (Content Management System) to sit on top of a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) instead of a PaaS (Platform as a Service). Moreover, this migration will improve the disaster recovery capabilities, allow a vertical scalling without downtime and also allow the use of compartments so that different teams only access the machines in a specific compartment (ex: DBAs only access the machines in the database compartment)
Team Building
As said, Celfocus maintains a healthy relation with Vodafone team. It is normal to travel onsite to be close to them for daily activities. However, they are also coming to Lisbon frequently by Celfocus invitation.
Do you know that…
… the live sharing of the sprint reviews with the client, results on videos being stored in the cloud per user story, per sprint?
Every video is stored and can be accessed at any point of time.
My Thanks to…
Thanks to the Celfocus EOL entire team for the welcome and sympathy receiving Hugo for one day, specially to Sara Gil and Margarida Janeiro, who shared the most information they could for the time.
Images 9: Celfocus EOL Team