Chandran Das Aundhe 2021 Agile or Waterfall Development The Clementon Company Dilemma
Chandran Das Aundhe 2021 Agile or Waterfall Development The Clementon Company Dilemma
Teaching Case
JITTC
Journal of Information Technology
Karthikeyan Chandran1
and Madhuchhanda Das Aundhe2
Abstract
This case study documents the challenges faced by Iota Consultancy Services, an IT Service organization, as it
simultaneously developed and deployed an IT Services Management software product for one of its premier clients,
The Clementon Company. A leading market research firm, The Clementon Company had its footprints across the
globe. Its recent acquisition of several smaller research agencies had created a complex IT landscape, in terms of the
technologies adopted and the processes followed. In Iota Consultancy Services’ 10-year-old history, this engagement with
The Clementon Company was a significant milestone, consisting of two parts—(1) Streamlining and standardizing The
Clementon Company’s IT processes and (2) maintaining The Clementon Company’s organization-wide IT infrastructure.
Iota Consultancy Services began this crucial assignment with an initial study to identify a product for the The Clementon
Company’s IT department. Iota Consultancy Services, a rapidly growing player in the sector, had indigenously developed
a few IT products, as well. It had an IT Services Management product called Helpdesk Management. Being the sole
service provider for maintaining The Clementon Company’s entire IT infrastructure, Iota Consultancy Services felt
that Helpdesk Management could be deployed as a single tool across the organization. However, until now, Helpdesk
Management had never been deployed as a comprehensive IT Services Management product for any organization. This
meant that Iota Consultancy Services needed to simultaneously enhance its Helpdesk Management tool by developing
new features, and also deploy it for The Clementon Company. This was Iota Consultancy Services’ chance to earn a
reputation as a successful product company, which would result in increased revenue. However, if things did not go
well, Iota Consultancy Services could lose face forever. Iota Consultancy Services’ dilemma was whether it should
propose Helpdesk Management as a tool for The Clementon Company, or not. At this juncture, everything depended on
whether Iota Consultancy Services could successfully customize the Helpdesk Management tool to suit The Clementon
Company’s requirements.
Keywords
SDLC, IT Services Management, agile methodology, project management
It was a tough time for Mr. Shankar Elan, the program man- The roll out that went ahead last month was limited to
ager responsible for rolling out Helpdesk Management only less than a hundred users of the Incident Management
(HDM) in all the divisions of The Clementon Company’s functionality of the product, and these were all people who
(TCC) IT operations. A month ago, when the base version have not used any sophisticated tools for this functionality
of HDM was rolled out to the Latin American users, it
turned out to be a nightmarish situation for Mr. Elan and the 1
Accenture, India
whole HDM team, as they got to know that there were more 2
Independent Faculty and Researcher, India
than 80 post-production defects. While the HDM team is
still clearing away all those defects, the client management Corresponding author:
Madhuchhanda Das Aundhe, Independent Faculty and Researcher, 1A,
is insisting on the successive roll outs of the product to
Classic Residency, 8/1, 15th Cross, Eswara Layout, Indiranagar 2nd
other geographies and other operational units with the Stage, Bangalore 560038, Karnataka, India.
requested functionalities within 5 months from now. Email: [email protected]
2
Chandran and Das Aundhe Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases 00(0)
9
prior to this roll out. Other features of the product such as Application Development and Maintenance team, sim-
Change Management, Configuration Management and ply known as the ADM team, has its presence in different
Problem Management were not required for the users in parts of the world, though not as geographically diverse as
Latin America. In comparison, the final roll out is aimed at the help desk. However, a vast majority (70%) of the mem-
several thousand users across the globe, including those bers of this operational unit are located in North America,
who have used other sophisticated tools for functionalities while around 20% of the team members are located in their
such as Incident Management, Change Management. This offshore development center in India, and the remaining
would mean that those users would be more critical in 10% are located in France, Australia, South Africa and
reviewing the features of the product and the number of Brazil. This ADM operational unit was not greatly affected
defects reported could go very high, if proper attention is by the merger activity, except for the addition of a handful
not given to the requirements or if the expectations about of software engineers and managers. The members of this
the product are not set right in the minds of the users. Only unit have all been using a single IT Services Management
the help desk users (of TCC) of Latin America are using the (ITSM) product and this tool helps them handle processes
product right now, and in a few months’ time, the same tool such as Change Management, Problem Management and
has to be rolled out to all other operational units. Incident Management. It is a highly sophisticated tool and
Mr. Andrew Partha, vice president, Infrastructure the users are exposed to the comfort offered by this tool
Delivery Unit of Iota Consultancy Services (ICS), is also over the past 5 years.
the head responsible for all the proprietary software prod- HR Payroll and Benefits team is undergoing a sea change
ucts developed and owned by ICS. He has entrusted Elan in the past few months, following the acquisition of several
with the huge task of successfully deploying the HDM companies. Although the team is not as big as the help desk
product in TCC’s IT landscape. The recent customer com- team, the complications with respect to aligning the HR poli-
plaints about the poor performance of the product have cies and other employee benefits of TCC to that of the other
annoyed him and the pressure has percolated down on Elan. acquired companies have been extremely challenging. Some
He has to find out ways to ensure that the product imple- of the users have been using industry products for Incident
mentations in other geographies planned in the coming Management, while others are tracking incidents just in an
months will go smoothly. excel sheet. The head of this operational unit is determined
on rolling out a single tool to handle their incidents, in an
effort to streamline their day-to-day operations.
About TCC IT Infrastructure Services team is another operational
TCC is a leading market research firm and has its opera- unit that manages the complete Infrastructure Services
tions spread across the globe. In order to expand its scope required to run the business of TCC. Recently, as part of the
and scale, the company acquired several smaller research contract signed between TCC and ICS, this team is in the
agencies in various countries. The IT operations of the process of handing over a majority of their responsibilities
organization are broadly classified into four divisions: to the ICS team. A large part of the transition is already over
and the ICS team has started taking ownership of several
1. TCC Helpdesk; infrastructure operations in multiple geographies. This
2. Application Development and Maintenance; team uses the same tool that ADM was using to handle
3. HR Payroll and Benefits; Incident Management, Change Management, Configuration
4. IT Infrastructure Services. Management and Problem Management.
The different operational units of TCC and the geograph-
TCC Helpdesk is the entity responsible for handling all the ical locations of these operations are shown in Exhibit 1.
calls from TCC’s internal and external customers, who call ICS is responsible for rolling out HDM in all the operational
to report the issue they face. The operations of TCC units located in all the geographies. The aim is to streamline
Helpdesk have increased significantly after the recent and standardize the key processes of their IT operations,
acquisition of many smaller firms; hence, their call han- namely, Incident Management, Change Management,
dling is done in silos these days. For instance, if a customer Configuration Management and Problem Management.
calls the help desk of Australia to report an issue, and if the Although both the companies had access to skilled man-
customer service representative finds out that the problem power and related resources to do this activity, the whole
is because of an application hosted in a server located in exercise was quite complicated.
Hungary, the incident record created for the call cannot be
transferred to the team in Hungary. Instead, they have to
About ICS
call the help desk of Hungary and create another incident
record. Thus, they are in need of a tool that would enable ICS is one of the rapidly growing software exporters in
them to handle not just their regular activities, but will also India and has started competing with bigger players in the
have a provision to transfer tickets to help desk teams Indian software industry. Over the past 10 years, ICS has
located across different geographies. grown steadily; today, it is one of the leading software
Chandran
10 and Das Aundhe Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases 12(1)3
time in framing a structure for the new team. He decided The different modules under product deployment are as
to divide his team into two units—one responsible for follows:
product development, including activities such as
Customization, Migration of data from older tools and Data Configuration Team—Responsible for configuring
the other responsible for product deployment, including the various users of the tool and also the information
activities such as setting up the configuration of the vari- about the support groups, who will be part of this tool.
ous parameters for the users of the tool and the technical The right permission has to be set for the right users.
architecture for hosting the HDM application for end Similarly, the workflow configuration for different kinds
users. (For a detailed organization chart, please refer to of incidents and the change of records are done by this
Exhibit 2.) group. They interact with TCC’s clients to understand
The different modules under product development are as how the incident records were classified and determine
follows: how the workflow should be configured for the differ-
ently classified incidents/changes.
Integration Team—Responsible for integrating HDM Infrastructure Architecture Team—Responsible for
with various other tools and products available in the IT deciding the required technical architecture for the prod-
environment of TCC. To name a few, there are network uct roll out. Decisions about the numbers and types of
monitoring tools which constantly examine key param- servers, the software applications that are to be installed
eters with respect to servers and other network devices. in the server, the hard disk capacity etc. are all taken by
Any alert or warning should be notified to the respective this team. This team is in charge of the database and
support group. When HDM is rolled out, an incident application server and they also devise strategies for
record should be automatically created and assigned to a backup and disaster recovery.
specific support group to handle the alerts raised by the
Production Support Team—Responsible for supporting
network monitoring tool. Similarly, when the TCC help
the HDM product. All issues reported about the HDM
desk receives a call from a user, she or he may be asked
tool are handled by this team in tandem with other devel-
to enter the incident record number over the dial pad,
opment and configuration teams to set right the defects
when that person asks for an update on the incident
detected. This team runs 24*7 as the issues can be
record that was already created. In such a case, the cor-
reported by anyone from anywhere across the globe.
responding incident record should be opened for view-
ing in the desktop of the help desk agent who attends the
As one can notice, the teams here have been structured
call made by the user.
on the basis of different capabilities. The work products are
Customization Team—Responsible for enhancing the passed sequentially from one team to another. For example,
features of the HDM tool, based on the different require- the tool was customized to build all features, then the test-
ments proposed by the clients from TCC. They work with ing team validated the features and then the data migration
the representatives of each of the four operational units, team ported data from older systems to HDM. Then the
understand their requirements and take them to the next production support team was addressing the issues reported
level to incorporate those features into the product. Many by users in the production environment. The structure of
a times, this team feels the heat while convincing the rep- the teams did not provide for closer collaboration and iden-
resentatives to standardize the IT Service Management tification of defects earlier in the lifecycle or receive con-
processes across different operational units. stant feedback. What would have been interesting is having
Chandran
12 and Das Aundhe Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases 12(1)5
a different blend of the teams in order to have people with Have I made any mistake in terms of structuring the
multiple capabilities working together in a collaborative teams for this program? The development teams follow a
environment, seeking feedback and addressing issues on waterfall model to incorporate the features in the tool.
the go. Given the very short time frame to integrate all the require-
ments into the tool, will this team structure hold good or
should I weigh other options?
Challenges ahead of Elan and his Should I go to Mr. Andrew Partha and explain to him
team frankly that the product is not very efficient, and trying to
The process consultants decided to go ahead with HDM for pitch in this tool against the market leaders is not a good
the standardization of IT processes because of the reasons strategy? Will he understand and appreciate my viewpoint,
stated above. However, they overlooked the fact that HDM or will he get irritated, as he is also under pressure?
had not been deployed as a comprehensive ITSM product ICS wants to showcase the successful roll out of HDM
for any organization as big as TCC. The previous imple- for TCC to the outside world, and thereby earn a reputation
mentations of HDM were to clients in a much smaller scale, as a good product company too. This tag will help gain
with a maximum of a few hundred users, who were neither more projects and hence more revenue for ICS. If that hap-
geographically dispersed, nor had used any ITSM products pens, my team and I will be greatly appreciated and
in the past. Unlike the TCC clients’ demands now, they had rewarded. Can I still hope for success, or should ICS not
not had varying requirements. The architecture used for have thought of entering the software product space domi-
those earlier implementations was very similar to the one nated by market leaders? Should we have just concentrated
used by ICS for its in-house implementation. Now with the on software services and outsourcing, which until now has
proposed implementation of HDM for TCC, the tasks ahead earned millions for the company?
are daunting. Also, the final architecture is not decided by
the team headed by Prasad, who reports to the deployment Project planning
manager Vivek, who in turn directly reports to Elan.
Requirements gathering
The user community from different business units wanted
to retain the functionalities that they experienced with their The customization team conducted several requirement
old tool, in the new tool as well. As a result, the number of gathering sessions with multiple stakeholders. Following is
requirements that had to be customized was too huge. This the exhaustive list:
was the case with all those users who had experienced the
top ITSM products. On the other hand, in certain geogra- 1. Infrastructure leads from United States;
phies, the clients were just using the excel sheet to record 2. Application support leads from United States;
incidents reported by callers and didn’t have any sophisti- 3. Third-party ticketing tool admins from United
cated ITSM product. For them, any dedicated tool was good States.
enough to support their business processes. By and large,
the product team figured out that the requirements of the HR Once the requirements were collected from these various
Payroll team and the Helpdesk team were similar, as were stakeholders, a consolidated list was prepared and sent out
the requirements of the ADM and the infrastructure teams. to the same stakeholders for validation. The sign-off was
Thus, the HDM team initially tried to create two instances not formal; the offshore development team manager and
of the same product, to tackle with the problem of varying the onshore coordinators were finding it difficult to obtain
requirements from multiple operational units. an approval for the understanding of requirements. Some of
There were new initiatives inside the operational units, the stakeholders were reluctant to freeze the requirements
with provisions to transfer incident records or change until and unless they saw the new features and were able to
requests across these units. Such a provision did not exist use them in the tool. Nevertheless, the offshore team started
before the merger activity. Now as the organization wanted their development work and started prioritizing, designing
to roll out a single ITSM product across the globe, they and developing the features. Little did they know that what-
wanted to have seamless integration across multiple opera- ever they develop would go through a lot of changes.
tional units and that necessitated such transfers across units. It so happened that the requirements were not standard
Elan has been pondering over a few questions. across all the modules (Incident, Problem Management etc.)
Was the decision to install HDM, to cater to such a or across the various teams, and they were certainly not
diverse group of users with diverse requirements, a good etched in stone. As there were multiple teams who were used
one? Did the process consultants really compare the capa- to different ITSM products, just collecting all the features
bilities of HDM vis-à-vis the more flexible products in the across the tools and drafting a consolidated requirements
market before taking this decision? Were they aware that document turned out to be a mammoth task. Realizing those
HDM had never been rolled out in such a big scale before? requirements using HDM, given the inherent constraints and
Had they simply overlooked these important facts? limitations of the tool, was a challenge. The users of
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Chandran and Das Aundhe Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases 00(0)
13
the system were better off working directly on the tool to cheered the team by wishing them a happy New Year and
understand the various features and improvise upon those was hopeful that things will be completed satisfactorily in
than trying to finalize the requirements on paper before the the New Year.
commencement of the design and build activities. It was New Year’s Eve and one of the development leads,
Karthik, was on a trip to Goa with some of his old friends from
college. Most of them are now working for IT services firms
Project planning and testing
and consulting firms. Over a drink in the resort, they were shar-
The project plan prepared by the development team was as ing some of the trends and things that interested them the most.
follows: One of Karthik’s friends, who is a consultant in agile methodol-
ogy of software development, was very passionate about what
There are 2 major releases—V1.0 and V2.0. The first release is agile can do and how it can help organizations. When he said,
slated for March 201X (around 5 months from now) and the “Organizations have to choose the right software development
second release is scheduled 3 months later (i.e. June 201X). methodology very carefully, if they are to succeed,” Karthik
Each release will have 4 phases—first for EMEA, then for interrupted, “Hey! I’m with this same IT services firm for the
APAC, followed by LATAM and finally for US. There are
past 8 years. I’ve never used a different development methodol-
sessions scheduled to demonstrate the product features, exactly
2 weeks before each phase of every release for each geography.
ogy than waterfall. Is it not true that agile is only for product
Hence it is decided that the complete testing, including UAT, companies?” His friend replied, “What if your IT services firm
should be completed a week before the demo sessions start. gets into developing a product?” The bartender intervened with
The task is cut out for the project delivery team. In 4 months’ another round of tequila shots. The friends toasted the New
time, all the 190 requirements listed in the consolidated excel Year as the clock struck 12. It was celebrations all over and the
file are to be completed. The project manager will have an conversation digressed after that.
internal interim checkpoint to ensure that the team completes When he woke up the next morning, Karthik remembered
at least 100 requirements by end of this year. his conversation with his friend about agile methodology and
decided to find out more about this methodology. He spent a
After investing significant effort in building the system, couple of hours reading about stories, scrum, sprint etc., but
the project team realized that there were too many defects he was not able to comprehend these terms completely and
in production, mostly because the validation with stake- relate their relevance to his current project.
holders on various features happened only toward the end. The teams resumed their work in the New Year and were
As per the sequencing of the current project development determined to finish the remaining requirements well
approach, user testing was done only after developing all before deadline. Soon came the end of January, and the
the stated requirements. Instead, having frequent test manager decided to kick start integration testing. On 31
cycles, where the users are given an opportunity to play January, all the development work was completed and the
around the tool and provide instant feedback, would have User acceptance testing started. At the end of Day 1, 75
been more effective. Had this happened, the development defects were reported by users across multiple business
team would have had ample time to resolve the issues and teams and geographies. The leads and managers took a
to implement a relatively more stable application in the close look at the defects. A couple of them are listed below:
production environment.
1. In the Incident management module, three severi-
ties were requested “High,,” “Medium” and “Low..”
What lies ahead?
They are listed in the drop down, but we want it this
It was the end of the calendar year. The project manager way “1—High,” “2—Medium,” “3—Low.”
directed all the team leads to check whether all the interim 2. In the Change management module, the task cre-
milestones had been met with. After a detailed verification ated always gets routed to a default group. However,
of how the project was progressing, the team leads were it must be routed to different groups depending on
happy to note that about 105 requirements were completed certain parameters.
in the development environment. The unit test cases had 3. In the Incident management module, when the inci-
been developed for all of them and the test results were dent is about to violate the response SLA, a reminder
clearly documented as well. When the project manager should be sent 15 min before the violation. We
heard this, he was confused and skeptical because while he would like to have a provision to configure it differ-
had set the interim milestone as the completion of 100 ently for different severities.
requirements in the development region, he had not men-
tioned anything about testing the features overall or per- The team watched in horror as the challenges started piling
forming an integration testing. He comforted himself by up. Someone said, “These are new requirements. We have
thinking that if the unit testing is good, then it is more likely to turn down these requests.” Another said, “Whoever had
that the end product will also turn out to be good. He gathered requirements didn’t do a thorough job to capturing
Chandran
14 and Das Aundhe Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases 12(1)7
all the requirements.” A few were apprehensive that some 6. How does the use of cognitive automation technolo-
of these requirements will not be satisfied by the out-of- gies and trends such as Robotics Process Automation
the-sbox product functionality, and may require heavy cus- impact the selection of software development
tomization. Karthik wondered, “Would this scenario have methodologies?
been better if we had engaged with the clients more often
and much earlier?.” The clients were used to traditional Authors’ note
software development methodologies like waterfall. They This case has been prepared solely for the purpose of stimulating
are comfortable operating in an environment, where they student discussion in the classroom. The events and data are based
state their requirements, validate them and then perform a on real occurrences, although the names of the organizations,
detailed User Acceptance Testing much later, when the pro- locations and individuals have been disguised for reasons of
ject team has completed the development. The moot ques- privacy.
tion here is whether the clients can adopt a culture where
they sit together with the development team, provide con- Declaration of conflicting interests
tinuous feedback and evolve the product in an iterative The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
fashion? This clearly requires a different cultural mindset, respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this
and more importantly, a different set of capabilities. article.
Karthik arranged a brainstorming session with all the
leads and the manager, to discuss the various queries that Funding
haunted him, regarding the team structure, the requirements The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
of management’s approach etc. authorship and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Brainstorming session—offshore Karthikeyan Chandran https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6178-3246
delivery team Madhuchhanda Das Aundhe https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
The meeting, as one can sense, was very intense, and the par- 3015-0563
ticipants were in a mood to blame each other for this state. Recommended readings
Vikram wanted to ensure that there was some order and
meaning to this discussion and invited the leads to talk about Dingsøyr T, Nerur S, Balijepally V, et al. (2012) A decade of agile
methodologies: Towards explaining agile software develop-
the problem and their proposed solution. Karthik was pre-
ment. Journal of Systems and Software 85(6): 1213–1221.
pared to drive his points at any cost. He was ready to present Farrell A (2007) Selecting a software development methodology
a few slides that highlighted the differences between agile and based on organizational characteristics. Available at: http://
waterfall models of software development. He also was keen citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.614.96
to justify as to why he felt that the agile model was more 44&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed 7 February 2019).
appropriate for this engagement. He also had a few additional Hobbs B and Petit Y (2017) Agile methods on large projects in
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Serrador P and Pinto JK (2015) Does Agile work? A quantitative management consulting, software development and program
analysis of agile project success. International Journal of management. Before joining Accenture, Karthik has worked with
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Willcocks L, Lacity M and Craig A (2017) Robotic Process auto- engineering (Anna University) and a Masters in Business
mation: Strategic transformation lever for global business Administration (IIM Lucknow).
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7(1): 17–28.
Madhuchhanda Das Aundhe completed her PhD from the Indian
Williams L (2010) Agile software development methodologies
and practices. Advances in Computers 80: 1–44. Institute of Management Bangalore, India. Her area of specializa-
tion is Information Systems. She worked in the Indian Process
and IT industries before taking up research and teaching. Das
Author biographies Aundhe is a Fulbright Scholar. She handles courses for postgradu-
Karthikeyan Chandran is a Senior Manager in Accenture, special- ate programs and executive management programs. Her areas of
ized in the pursuit of sales opportunities in healthcare industry. He academic interests are software engineering and software project
has more than 15 years of IT experience that spans across management, e-governance, IT outsourcing.