How an East Coast utility shipped 12 mobile apps in 16 months and trained 1,000 employees in Agile
An IT organization of 600 people with 1,200 systems to manage needed speed without losing security. Agile Brains assessed, trained and restructured the teams, then delivered an omnichannel mobile portfolio on Azure.
A leading East Coast utility serving over 3.5 million electricity and gas customers set out to transform an IT organization of 600 people managing 1,200 systems. With Agile Brains as its transformation partner, it shipped 12 web and mobile applications in 16 months, trained over 1,000 employees in Agile, and now saves over $5 million a year from a single one of those applications.
The company's legacy enterprise IT infrastructure was expensive to run and hard to manage, and it had become the bottleneck for digital transformation. The IT organization maintained and supported more than 1,200 internal, customer and partner systems and applications.
The challenge
Agile and DevOps fundamentals were thinly understood across the IT organization. The CIO wanted to transform the culture into one that prioritized speed, agility and simplicity while maintaining security and quality. The company was targeting an overhaul of several existing applications alongside new development, and the Office of the CIO chose Agile Brains as its Agile transformation partner for building these mobile applications iteratively, on an industry-recognized low-code mobile platform as the primary IDE, with the freedom to pivot as needed.
How we helped
Assessment and training. A small team of enterprise Agile transformation leaders from Agile Brains assessed the current state of an IT organization of over 600 employees and contractors. Following the assessment and strategic recommendations, we ran comprehensive Agile bootcamp workshops at every level, from leadership and middle management to the development teams and the business groups that partner with IT.
Restructuring and prioritization. Development and business personnel were restructured into cross-functional agile teams running two-week sprints, focused on omnichannel mobile applications. We prioritized initiatives on ease of implementation against anticipated business value, while the company provisioned Azure cloud infrastructure for fast, scalable, secure mobile development, integration and deployment.
Delivery. Each application was managed in Azure DevOps for planning, prioritization, code management and value-driven sprint demos and retrospectives. As the teams moved from forming to norming to performing, Azure CI/CD pipelines, automation and weekly deployments became the norm.
The result
A portfolio of web and mobile applications now serves field mechanics, emergency response crews, system analysts, back-office staff and construction workers. Daily reporting of public hazards from company work saves over $5 million a year in equipment recovery. Azure DevOps became the standard project management tool across IT and the business, and the organization gained real business agility in product and project delivery: openness to changing requirements, an evolving architecture, and iterative delivery of value.
By the numbers
- 12 web and mobile applications delivered in 16 months, used by over 3,000 employees
- Over $5 million a year saved in equipment recovery through daily reporting of public hazards
- Over 1,000 employees trained in Agile, design thinking, digitization, web and mobile applications, and process optimization
- Azure DevOps adopted as the standard tool across 400+ IT staff and 200+ business employees
- 5,000+ field assets (valves, tunnels, stations, pipelines) scheduled and reported through the inspection apps
- Automated CI/CD pipelines with an average deployment frequency of under two weeks