Expectations towards IT are continuously increasing. In telecommunications, we especially need to adapt to a market where our business cannot grow anymore with classic telephony services; prices continuously decline. Our products compete with those of digital giants. We need to renew and extend our product portfolio to compensate for revenue losses in previously successful areas. As an internal IT, we are expected to significantly reduce time-to-market, to be a lot more flexible, to significantly increase our cost efficiency, and to continuously deliver higher quality output.

These expectations are not new, but we haven’t been able to live up to them by only improving the way of developing and operating. It now requires a more disruptive change – a new culture and a range of new capabilities.

In our session, we will present drivers, approach, intermediate results, and learnings of our ongoing Agile and DevOps journey. A central theme of our presentation will be the importance of establishing high levels of trust to get sufficient support for our transformation in our organization and to make it successful. We need trust in our ability to deliver high output for our business while completely changing our way of working. The organization needs to gain trust in the benefits of Agile and DevOps methods that appear to be less deterministic and rely less on process control. Managers need to let go and trust their teams to do the right thing.

After one and a half years of our transformation journey, we want to draw up an interim balance: we have achieved a lot; still, there remains a long way to go.