Continuous Delivery in Odigeo

Many of our colleagues have already wondered what is going on in the staircase in our Bailen office (Barcelona). Faces of happy people popping up on the wall committing to something which is new and exciting.

We have been changing Odigeo towards agility for more than a year. Our focus has so far been the organisation, and we left technology behind, but… we are starting to feel the pain now. The autonomy, we promised our teams, is not emerging. Also, many important initiatives are still coming from a centralized decision authority. The strange thing is that the organisation, including the management, doesn’t want this. The preferred way of creating products is with autonomous teams which drive their development by monitoring business outcomes and conducting many experiments to improve the services our customers need.

The reason for this misalignment is that our technology is lagging behind our organisational needs. In a way this was a conscious decision for us in the IT-leadership team. We wanted our technology to be driven by organisational and business needs. Those needs are becoming very tangible now. We, therefore, decided to create a program within the Butterfly initiative that will help us to create the alignment between organisation and technology.

Many people are working with technical improvements already and this initiative gives them the chance to join forces and pull into the same direction, and follow one single goal: From code ready to production in less than 15 minutes at any time. It is an ambitious goal that will need a lot of rethinking of things we do today.

 

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Continuous delivery