Many other teams at Spotify were impacted by Olingo’s work, but for this case study, only the FS team will be used as an example, and referred to as ‘the team’.
The Spotify culture and ITIL
Transparency, visualization and an agile mindset are, together with speed, the driving forces and mantras within the Spotify organization. A key part of the agile mindset is the concept of mission command and autonomous teams. The teams at Spotify were used to getting a clear mission and then, internally within the team, forming the tactics and capabilities to deliver. This mindset had a profound impact on how work was performed and improvements made.
When Olingo began its assignment, ITIL, as a framework, was relatively unknown within the Spotify organization, and some staff members felt that using frameworks slowed them down.
However, closer scrutiny proved that very few of the staff members making these remarks had any first-hand experience with ITIL. The ITIL framework served to guide the work being carried out, and implicit references were made to several of the ITIL processes throughout the assignment, including change management, demand management, incident management and request fulfilment.
Managing flow
One challenge for the team was to manage and prioritize the workload in an efficient manner. The team had several customers within the organization, and each of them expected the team to focus
There was no project or organizational change programme, and the results were to be reached as part of continuous improvement activities.
The following areas were within the scope of the assignment:
- Managing flow Finding an efficient way to manage the total workload for the teams, including change requests, incidents, technical debt and projects.
- Managing compliance Ensuring that the controls were in place to comply with the regulation imposed by the financial
bodies.
At Spotify, work is organized around cross functional, autonomous teams. This means that each team possesses all the capabilities required to drive a piece of work all the way to completion. Hand-offs from one team to another are rare, and avoided wherever possible. Each team is responsible for achieving its mission and reaching its goals but, in return, has the mandate to form a way of working that best fits the team. The FS team is responsible for delivering IT services that are used by internal functions, such as tax, procurement and accounting.
When Olingo began working with Spotify, these services were running on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and the FS team was responsible for developing the services as well as improving and supporting them. These services were highly impacted by the compliance requirements imposed by the regulatory bodies. In addition, the FS team had a key challenge at this stage, to move from an on-premise ERP to a mix of various best in class cloud ERPs, in a very limited timeframe.
Due to the time constraints, most people involved thought this could not be done in time.