Technology Enablement on a 180 year-old landscape

You can accumulate a lot of risk and technical debt on the technology landscape of an organisation that can trace its origins back 180 years. Evolution, growth, acquisition, and disposals have all shaped the business that is the Co-operative group. This has led to a very varied technical landscape - both in terms of approach and technology. On a landscape that includes everything from you-build-it-you-run-it teams running cloud-based applications through to far more traditional project-driven implementations, how do you effectively and systemically shake out the technical debt and help mitigate the technology risks while still providing teams with the autonomy to deliver in the right way for them.

This case study explores how a twisty-turny path led us to pull together an enablement function consisting of a set of Enabling and Tooling teams, each of which is at a different stage of evolution. We explore what worked and what didn’t and why we ended up with our current hypothesis including:
The ideas behind it
The foundations we were building on - lessons from initiatives that worked and initiatives that didn’t
How we managed to sell it
Why we started running the Pit Crew experiment to support a set of small teams

Since we are in the early stages of this work, it’s very much “how it started” or “lessons so far”. The intention is to come back next year (if we are invited) to let people know how it went (“how it’s going”). What worked, what didn’t, and where that’s left us.

⭐️ Speaker: Andy Longshaw
Head of Technology Enablement, The Co-operative Group

For about 20 years I've been writing software, delivering systems and helping development teams with technology, architecture and development practices. I have worked previously with LexisNexis, Advanced Legal, Barclays, Tesco, Laterooms.com, the BBC, QA Training, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems in various forms including developer, engineer, architect, development coach, trainer, author and consultant. I am particularly interested in the whys and wherefores of software development and how things really work for day-to-day development teams.

At various times I have been involved in organising the BCS Software Practice Advancement group and the European patterns community. I have written various articles, books and training courses, including co-authoring "Architecting Enterprise Solutions: Patterns for High-capability Internet-based Systems" with Paul Dyson.

Specialties: Leading and mentoring software development teams, being test obsessed, getting feedback, system design and architecture, software development, writing, and wrangling large organisations