Because our industry is rapidly changing, emerging technologies are quickly jumping into our ecosystems and digitalization is increasing complexity more and more, we went for agile to embrace those changes and put them to the advantage of our users (as Bram described on this page).
This means that we had to reshuffle a couple of things in our organization: organized squads oriented to projects or apps, we changed our floorplan, introduced new roles in our teams and created guilds.
This organization takes place in different squads:
- Create squads: You will be able to play with this squad deliverables when you install a new DataMiner version. Typically, these are applications under the DataMiner ecosystem: Cube, Dashboards, Jobs, Ticketing, etc. See also DataMiner Core Features, DataMiner Optional Features and Coming Soon blog posts, the best place to keep an eye on the upcoming improvements. The latest DataMiner version can be downloaded from the Downloads page.
- Deploy squads: cross-functional teams of system developers, technical account managers, project managers and operations engineers. From a deploy squad, you will receive new driver updates for your elements, a Visual Overview file that will improve your user experience or an automation script that maximizes your operational efficiency by automating a process. New driver updates can be found in our Catalog.
- Accelerate squads: part of the system engineering department, these teams are focused on delivering a solid, robust and easy-to-deploy DataMiner standard solution in order to increase the efficiency of the process. You can expect accelerate squads to deliver updated versions of DataMiner modules like SRM, IDP, PTP. You can read more about them on the DataMiner Applications and keep tuned on Coming Soon blog posts for news.
Each squad has a Product Owner, Agile Coach and QX (Quality and User Experience), as well as an assigned Coach, and they have the flexibility to define how they work. That’s why each squad defines their own battle plan that optimizes their work. Given this, some squads are using Scrum, others Kanban, adapting to the complex environment that is around them (even Waterfall if that makes sense and works well) with a single purpose: deliver the best possible value to our users and minimize risk.
In the next article, we can dig deeper into what happens behind the scenes when we receive a new order project; what challenges our squads are facing and how do they deal with them.