This case story presents a part of the journey of Sanoma Media Finland (SMF), the largest multi-channel media company in Finland, as they strive to embrace DevOps practices and foster a culture of collaboration and communication within their organization. It serves as a reminder that successful assessments require collaboration and willingness from both the client and the adviser.

Enable people by enabling them to collaborate

How do we ensure that DevOps is really embraced in an organization and teams are working together in a collaborative and communicative way?

Sanoma Media Finland (SMF) has close to 2,000 employees and is the biggest commercial media company in Finland. SMF is at the forefront of news services, entertainment and education – including streaming services. This requires a leader approach and mentality in service and software development to stay ahead of the pack.

There was an identified need for a successful large-scale DevOps mentality shift, but how to set the stage for it and gain more momentum? This need was as much about culture as it was about tech and tools: balancing technological choices and ways of working with team coordination, communication, and collaboration. To meet those expectations, SMF started a collaboration with Polar Squad and brought their business domain collaboration to a whole new level.

Sanoma Media Finland has been moving forward on their DevOps journey for a good while now and have already achieved good results with enabling teams and creating better workflows (thus happier developers), but they wanted to do more. This is where Polar Squad came in with the DevOps Assessment Service that provides a very comprehensive insight on how tech and people are working together.

We surveyed technology choices and ways of working with the Assessment participants. With that background information, one-on-one interviews are much more fruitful and we can better concentrate on certain topics – as well as allow space for interviewees to freely open up about what’s most important to them.

Culture-driven transformation

Scoping the project was interesting. Before the assessment work started, metrics were flagged as a very sensitive topic that should not be brought up by us in interviews, but we quickly realized that they were a key topic for almost every participant whom we talked with – interviewees brought up the subject for discussion on their own almost every single time. It was seen as very important to create better and more fitting metrics for the teams and to have metrics that would align with SMF-level reporting as well.

SMF being a large company with a wide range of different approaches to solutions and services, our assessment had to cover a lot of ground, but we were tasked with certain key aspects to focus on:

• How to better understand the ways of working teams had in place

• How to better unify ways of working and create buy-in

• How to implement more relevant metrics for teams and create ownership for said metrics

• How to create more collaboration and communication throughout SMF

• Uncover shared pain points within teams and business domains

It was apparent that almost everyone wanted to drive things forward, but how to actually do it and create ownership was the main question for SMF that needed objective input from Polar Squad. With our survey plus interview approach, we found very concrete issues to start working on and continue working on in order to accelerate DevOps transformation that enables more fluent and meaningful work for everyone at SMF. DORA metrics and CALMS evaluation are still in place, but they are just one piece of the puzzle and how to visualize the bigger picture.

The current state of things surprises and familiar faces

After assessing the situation and compiling a holistic view of the present situation, we highlighted our most important findings and recommended how to start implementing those improvements:

• Improve current ways of working by better adoption of the DevOps mentality, methodologies, and processes throughout business domains while agreeing on certain common templates throughout Sanoma Media Finland

• Encourage a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation – with a structured way of gathering feedback and moving things forward

• Enable more low effort communication and collaboration between teams, but also between tech and business

• Achieve better automation and quality assurance

SMF also wanted to uncover their underlying issues and pain points, team by team, and set goals in collaboration with Polar Squad’s experts to find points of improvement. Quite a few of the challenging issues were already known to the organization, but solutions for them were hard to implement or even communicate. Polar Squad being a third party provided a great solution for bringing these issues into the spotlight and talking about them very openly and practically without any internal bias.

How to turn your pain points into your strong points

One of the things that came up in almost every interview was that there was a dire need for more collaboration and clear, low effort communication between team leads, teams, business and different business domains.

Collaboration has been encouraged at different levels before, but in the past people easily chose not to engage in constant communication and collaboration if they felt too busy or weren’t familiar enough with their co-workers. This was a key finding for us to highlight in our report and carry over into the workshops that are included in our Polar Squad DevOps Assessment projects.

Through our surveys, we gathered a tech chart and ways of working visualization for each team and quickly discovered that test automation and overall quality assurance was lacking in many teams. This was quickly escalated to SMF and sparred with the Business Enablement Team’s QA lead. After some discussion and prioritization, QA was chosen as a topic for workshops as well to be thought out between teams with practical next steps to be agreed upon.

Workshops were held at Polar Squad HQ with Assessment participants. Our main topics for workshops were QA, collaboration and ways of working. The main goal for these workshops was to get team leads better acquainted with each other and lower the level of effort needed for communication and collaboration in the future. On top of that, a natural way for sharing best practices and knowledge was needed, so we incorporated exercises to engage participants to talk more with one another and actively participate in planning.

There were some great benchmarks established such as how to incorporate testing and automation for better QA, views on how to collaborate on planning to better take into consideration business domain level work and share learnings about new technologies. People really started discussing their pain points and strengths within their specific environment and how those compare with the pain points and strengths of others. This was invaluable – what others could learn or benefit from – whether it be development practices, ways of working or quality assurance! We created very concrete short-term roadmaps together for the identified low-hanging fruits and high-impact items in different topics with actionables for participants. Examples for technical implementations and internal developer community talks started forming right then and there.

The ability to commit to these goals and actionables were discussed and agreed upon as well so they would not just be written down in a memo and then forgotten. The same applies to our Assessment Report. We hosted workshops after the Assessment Project for the exact same reasons:

• To create buy-in

• To bring ownership and enthusiasm

• To actually start working on the findings fast and agile while taking the first steps to keep momentum going

• To carry over and nurture the open dialogue and forward-looking attitude cultivated by the assessment

• To keep the extremely invaluable internal insights and invested effort from being buried in the shady corners of SharePoint :)

It’s all about will – and collaboration

Sanoma Media Finland has been very open, collaborative, and active with us and this ensured the best possible outcome of our Assessment work. It is a great reminder that a trusted adviser can come in and find results, but a successful Assessment requires dedication and willingness from the client as well. It is also a huge pleasure to see this kind of reception and initiative from such a big corporation as SMF. Polar Squad was offered the opportunity to present our findings and DevOps Assessment Report Executive Summary to different boards and key decision makers. This is crucial for our Assessments so that they have the maximum impact possible and really create buy-in at all levels of the client organization. After all, true DevOps is not just for tech, it is a holistic mentality and approach for everyone to embrace!

We will be continuing our collaboration with SMF and working on further periodically recurring assessments. The goal is to maintain visibility for SMF on their constant improvement and verify the outcomes of the actions and initiatives that were started with this project – and pivot if needed.

Do you want to gain similar momentum? Are you longing for a great atmosphere in your working environment? Please contact us and let’s see where your pain points are and which awesome things are already in place, just waiting to be shared to others!

Contact Lasse Mäki:
lasse.maki@polarsquad.com – +358 451 635 616