Agile and DevOps are the right prescription for BMJ’s digital transformation
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New ways of DevOps working have demanded a new managed hosting contract with Datapipe at the 170-year old healthcare publisher.
When Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer at British Medical Journal (BMJ), is asked to present to other organizations about the digital transformation she’s spearheaded at the healthcare publisher over the past four years, she likes to show her audience a picture of the door to the IT department at the company’s London headquarters in Tavistock Square.
I tell them, ‘This door used to be locked and the business would post its requirements under that locked door.
This will sound like a familiar scenario to many IT leaders, but today, the door to the BMJ IT department stands wide open. In fact, visitors may not find many members of Cooper’s team toiling behind it, because they’re frequently elsewhere in the building, working side by side with colleagues from the wider business.
In particular, they’re out there collaborating with product teams, helping them to devise new ways to distribute original articles, podcasts, videos and blogs, both online and via mobile apps. And pretty often, product owners from the business will come and sit in the IT department, too. Says Cooper:
Before, the tech team worked in isolation, not truly understanding what the business was trying to achieve. Now, we co-locate and everyone just gets on with it. People are moving desks every three or four sprints and no-one bats an eye. When I first got here, you couldn’t even get people to move a pot plant.
The cultural change that’s been achieved has been about understanding why we do things as an IT department and what they help BMJ to accomplish: simplifying delivery of a product, growing the business for a product, launching a new one or pushing it into a new territory.
At the same time, she adds, the IT team must meet these goals faster than ever before, hence her insistence on Agile methodologies and, increasingly, DevOps. It’s more important these days, she says, to get new software up and running and be able to use it to test content out in the market than it is to take months over delivering perfect code that arrives six months too late:
I haven’t really changed the structure of the team that much, but I’ve changed the way it works a great deal. When I joined here in 2012, we had a fairly traditional set-up in which developers did the development work and handed it over to operations to put it live. And testers would test it, find problems - and the devs would say, ‘Well it worked well enough when I was building it.’ So there was typical misalignment internally and far too little interaction with the outside world.
As a measure of how much things have changed, Cooper reckons around 60% of BMJ’s portfolio of medical and science journals moved into DevOps last year, allowing the company to vastly increase its software delivery and release cycles. Whereas new releases used to happen around once a month, the IT team now releases software three or four times a day and, because much of that process is now automated, she says:
...it’s the biggest non-event. There’s no anxiety, no standing around to see whether it’ll work or not. Nobody’s on tenterhooks.
But as the BMJ IT team adopted new ways of working, it became clear that it was still dealing with a lot of older web servers. In short, faster development cycles were being held back by not just by creaking infrastructure, much of which was approaching end-of-life, but also by an eight-year hosting contract that was similarly coming to a close.
Managed services
Having issued a request for proposal last year, BMJ drew up a list of 15 managed service providers that it believed could help it migrate its systems to a new, fully automated private cloud environment, in which each BMJ product would have its own set of application and database servers, so that code and files could be reliably deployed to each application server.
The ability to provide access to public cloud infrastructure was also important, as was delivering a ‘single pane of glass’ management console to enable BMJ IT staff to monitor both private and public environments. This list was narrowed to a shortlist of three companies, of which Datapipe came out on top. According to Alex Hooper, BMJ’s head of operations:
Datapipe had managed AWS; they did hybrid clouds, they could help us expand into China and they had the adaptability to work with us in the way we wanted. Some vendors draw a line - you’re either fully managed or not at all, but Datapipe had the flexibility and the know-how to work BMJ’s way.
Much of the migration work, meanwhile, has taken place during 2016, says Cooper:
In the last six months, we’ve moved 200-plus virtualized environments from the previous set-up into the new one. The one KPI [Key Performance Indicator] I set was that customers shouldn’t notice we were moving [because of experiencing downtime]. In nine months, we had in total around 30 minutes of tiny outages, none of them lasting more than a couple of minutes each - I think that’s pretty damn amazing.
Already, the Datapipe-led migration has whittled down the time it takes the BMJ to set up a development environment from two weeks to around two hours, but the plan now is to move to a hybrid cloud environment and start building those dev environments in the AWS public cloud.
What Cooper’s keenest to stress, however, is that none of the sweeping changes that she’s led at BMJ have been forced on a mutinous or resentful staff. Responses to new methods have certainly been mixed, she concedes: some relished the freedom of closer collaboration with colleagues inside and outside of the IT department, while others were initially terrified. She says:
A lot of it has been about me saying to people, and I know this may sound naff: ‘We’re going on a journey and here’s where I need all of you to get to - but I know that some of you will get there sooner than others.’”
Agile coaches, brought in to help the IT team find better ways of talking to non-technical colleagues have helped, she says, but patience and letting people find their own way has been more important.
I hope I’ve let people handle change at their own pace. I’ve made it clear that they had choices, that they wouldn’t be booted out because they weren’t leading a scrum first time out. I’ve seen them help each other. This organization is a friendly place - we don’t hire and fire and people are generally pretty forgiving and tolerant of each other.
I won’t say we didn’t lose a few people along the way, because this new style just wasn’t right for them, but now, when I see a shy, softly spoken colleague addressing the board of directors to demonstrate some of the prototypes we’re working on, I’m incredibly proud.