Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2020-08-10)

Agile

The

Advantage

Information

Technology

TL SSI N

S F W F

IT TE MS

Connect business

strategy to technical

execution.

Team workspace to

stay on the same page.

A collaborative ITSM

solution.

TL SSI N’S

GL CH

13

offi ces

4K

employees

170K

customers

RCH N R

ChiefInformation

Officer

Archana joined

Atlassian in 2018 after

working for Symantec

and Cisco.

Learn more about Atlassian and agile management at atlassian.com/enterprise

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We spoke to Archana Rao, Chief

Information Officer of Atlassian, about

how agile management can help IT

professionals address new challenges.

Q: What is agile management for

IT professionals?

A: IT always gets the reputation of being

slow and expensive, and, too often, focused

on the technology without understanding

how it will be used. Agile management

means you focus on providing value,

and doing so continuously. You put your

customer fi rst.

Q: Who is the IT customer?

A: Every employee in the company is a

customer. We have to have very good

relationships across all the company’s

departments, both in the trenches and at a

C-Suite level, to eff ectively serve them.

Q: How does that play out day-to-day?

A: Our goal is to have every new employee

be productive on their fi rst day. We were

really put to the test during the pandemic,

when all those folks were being on-boarded

from their homes.

For my team, it was all hands on deck.

First we had to arrange to send a laptop

to every employee — sometimes directly,

sometimes through third parties, depending

on the regulations of the country in which

the employee works.

Then we had to make sure that their WiFi

was working, that their VPN was working

and that they could access everything on

our systems. Despite all that, in March

2020, we remotely on-boarded a record

200 employees.

Q: How do you prepare for a challenge

like that?

A: In a sense, you can’t — not specifi cally.

You need a company culture that fosters

operating in an open, transparent manner,

where everyone is comfortable learning

from everyone else, and not just in a

hierarchical way. It’s those characteristics

of adaptability and teamwork that are the

real preparation for the challenges you

don’t see coming.

Q: How does this apply to IT teams

in companies that aren’t in the

software industry?

A: As every team in the world starts

operating remotely, IT departments have an

incredible challenge, but also an incredible

opportunity. How can technology be

brought to bear for every team to unleash

their fullest potential and build amazing

products and services for everyone? That’s

the challenge agile IT is meant to address.

Q: What’s often overlooked with agile

management and IT?

A: To move fast, you have to have

strong relationships with people in every

department, both to understand what is

needed to meet their needs and to get

their buy-in.

Agile management allows

you to deliver flexibility

along with speed. And that’s

a hard thing to accomplish.