Q&A: Inside UPS’ massive digital transformation and its ‘agile’ philosophy

cheryl

I started this.
Staff member
Q&A: Inside UPS’ massive digital transformation and its ‘agile’ philosophy - siliconAngle

Dropping off some 21 million packages daily across 200 countries, the United Parcel Service of America Inc. has plenty of interactions to track. Known for its logistics prowess, UPS has managed to evolve business for today’s digital overhaul, averaging 200 million daily tracks on its revamped system launched last year. Their record was 335,000,000 tracks in a single day.

How have they accomplished this? The tracking system was all built on a new Red Hat OpenShift platform developed by their IT team. And while success has been a huge motivation, so has not being afraid to fail in order to succeed.

Nish Jani, senior application development manager at UPS, and Khurshid Sohail, application developer at UPS, spoke with Stu Miniman and John Walls, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston. They discussed UPS’ digital transformation, the successes and failures, and how to navigate it all.
 

ifreak

Active Member
I am in IT. We were all very excited when it seemed that UPS was taking Agile seriously. However, that soon faded as the biggest obstacle we have in implementing Agile projects is ... our management team. I will explain, the principles of Agile state that a Product Owner gets to prioritize whatever the agile team wants to work on first, thus, we can embrace change. With those priorities set, team decides how much an be delivered during a sprint. Once agreed on no new work can be added during the sprint. However, once in a Sprint (timeframe in which to get the work done), management is constantly attempting to add new work, when the team pushes back we are told to suck it up and adding new work IS Agile (it's not). This process completely breaks agile and it's principles, demoralizes the team and causes the constant turnover we experience. The young developers we hire either out of school or especially from other companies think our entire organization is a joke.
 

burrheadd

KING Of GIFS
I am in IT. We were all very excited when it seemed that UPS was taking Agile seriously. However, that soon faded as the biggest obstacle we have in implementing Agile projects is ... our management team. I will explain, the principles of Agile state that a Product Owner gets to prioritize whatever the agile team wants to work on first, thus, we can embrace change. With those priorities set, team decides how much an be delivered during a sprint. Once agreed on no new work can be added during the sprint. However, once in a Sprint (timeframe in which to get the work done), management is constantly attempting to add new work, when the team pushes back we are told to suck it up and adding new work IS Agile (it's not). This process completely breaks agile and it's principles, demoralizes the team and causes the constant turnover we experience. The young developers we hire either out of school or especially from other companies think our entire organization is a joke.
SNAFU
 

Fred's Myth

Nonhyphenated American
Reminds me of a female manager I had whose initials were CF. She was commonly referred to as Cluster Fu**. Gave her a riddle one AM sort where the answer was ALPHA KENNY BODY. She walked around saying it aloud, asking everybody what it meant. We nearly wet ourselves laughing.
 
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