Agile Suncorp tackles the legacy issues

Suncorp CIO Jeff Smith is no fan of large big-bang IT projects, taking instead an "agile" or "lean" approach to systems development. The lean production model underpins Toyota's production system, and many of its principles have been adopted by the agile software development movement.

Agile software development has been gathering pace over the last decade and involves an iterative approach to systems development. Instead of the traditional waterfall approach where the software lifecycle steps through concept, analysis, design, construction, testing and maintenance, agile software development is more iterative.

It demands IT and business staff work together to define a problem, then build and test a solution.

Smith has championed the agile method at Suncorp, where the IT staff and 2500 business staff have now been trained in the approach. The company has also this year launched the Agile Academy, which hosts 25 courses on agile development that Suncorp developed internally, and is now making generally available online.

Smith is confident it's the right way to tackle the challenge.

"Large projects like a core systems revamp or telecoms transformation (Smith was formerly Telstra's CIO) - if you can't get a handle on what you are trying to solve you won't get it right," he argues.

"If you say that the project is $1 billion upfront then you don't know the problem you are solving."

The agile approach means "You don't spend four months building 100-page requirements documents - you use story boards and story cards - and have a more cohesive management system to prioritise the problems. You limit the project definition to weeks.

"If you have great big telecommunications projects and great big banking projects then you can't define the problem so you can't develop the solution. Your core team should be seven to ten people."

He says that Patrick Snowball understands and agrees with the agile approach.

Snowball might have been less impressed had he joined Suncorp earlier, however, as Suncorp IT staff speaking at the Agile Australia conference held in Sydney last month confirmed that there had been a drop in productivity in the early days while the organisation came to grips with the agile approach.

Snowball's demand for business process reform will now act as agile's and Smith's acid test.