GE Healthcare Switches from Waterfall to Agile
GE Healthcare (www.gehealthcare.com) is a $17-billion business unit of General Electric (www.ge.com) that manufactures products designed to make clinicians more productive. These technologies, which range from high-definition CT scanners to diagnostic pharmaceutical devices, are developed by the company's Imaging Solutions unit. Imaging Solutions employs 375 engineers who support 18 high-tech products. Unfortunately, this unit has experienced several diffi culties. First, Imaging Solutions struggled with the predictability of its systems development project execution. The cycle time on projects was too long to begin with (from 12 to 24 months), and many projects experienced significant delays beyond this timeframe. These long cycle times frequently caused the business to add features beyond the initial user requirements, refl ecting concerns that customers could not wait for a new system to provide these features. This process, in turn, often increased a project's scope, causing further delays and increasing the project cycle time even more.
These longer cycle times increased the risk that the user requirements gathered at the beginning of the project would be out-of-date by the time the product reached the market. Going further, Imaging Solutions' systems development process followed the systems development life cycle approach. In other words, it's the process that began with investigation, systems analysis, and systems design. After completing these steps, the unit then conducted a formal design review. After obtaining the various approvals for the design, the engineers began programming new systems. Programming at Imaging Solutions typically took several months, after which the development team would release the new system into a test environment to collect user feedback. This point in the process was usually the first time that users came into contact with the new system. After the team accumulated and incorporated user input, it continued the testing effort prior to implementing the new system.
The problem with the SDLC approach was that the engineers could not incorporate user-requested modifications into the system until very late in the project cycle. As a result, any significant errors in the system could require the team to change the design completely-in effect, to start over. This approach wasted a great deal of time and effort, and it often caused significant delays in projects. To address these issues, Imaging Solutions replaced its SDLC approach with an agile-based scrum initiative. Scrum focuses on maximizing the development team's ability to deliver iterations quickly and to respond effectively to additional user requirements as they emerge. In contrast to SDLC, agile development involves adding functionality in a series of phases and then testing the product after each phase has been completed.
The Imaging Solutions unit particularly liked the idea of demonstrating each phase's functionality to users and then receiving immediate feedback. This approach was much more economical and efficient than not receiving feedback until the system was nearing completion. Imaging Solutions launched its move to agile development with a single development team and a pilot project that had a manageable scope and a 4-month deadline. The project was substantial enough that the team could learn scrum skills while delivering a valuable product, but manageable enough to be a good first test run. The team also established clear criteria to measure the project's success so that team members could objectively evaluate whether they had achieved their goals. The pilot project was concluded successfully, and it contained all of the correct features and the necessary functionality. The release, however, was one month past the desired roll-out date, so Imaging Solutions is still working on its predictability of delivery. This pilot project revealed that Imaging Solutions could adopt agile development, but only with certain limitations. Specifi cally, the rigors of operating in a regulated industry required the company to deploy a hybrid development process that involved more initial planning and testing than would be practiced in other agile organizations.
Following the resolution of the pilot project, Imaging Solutions formed 10 scrum teams of 7 to 9 people each. Every two weeks, the teams met on Wednesday mornings to conduct increment reviews and on Wednesday afternoons to hold their planning meetings for the next increment. This process ensured that teams were sharing knowledge with their fellow team members and were aware of what was being done outside their particular team. To obtain maximum benefits from the agile system, Imaging Solutions had to transform its culture somewhat by modifying the role of managers and individual contributors on scrum teams. For example, managers can no longer use a command-and-control style of management. Instead, they must concentrate on assembling empowered teams. These cultural and process changes have generated positive results for Imaging Solutions. Obtaining user feedback early and often has enabled the company to prioritize features correctly.
For instance, in one example, the new system helped a team identify a clinical workflow it previously was not aware of. Insights such as this one will continue to allow Imaging Solutions to develop products that will be successful in the market and to release those products in a timely manner, thereby increasing the company's profitability as well as its credibility. Sources: Compiled from "Advanced Imaging Solutions for the Surgical Space," GE Healthcare News, November 30, 2012; S. Denning, "GE Healthcare Gets Agile," Forbes, June 1, 2012; R. King, "GE Becomes More Agile," The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2012; K. Liang, "What Jobs Are Available for Software Engineers Who Want to Advance Medical Research?" Forbes, March 2, 2012; J. Hammond, "Customer-Centric Development: It's Now or Never for IT Shops," InformationWeek, April 26, 2011; S. Denning, "Six Common Mistakes That Salesforce.com Didn't Make," Forbes, April 18, 2011; A. Deitsch and R. Hughes, "GE Healthcare Goes Agile," InformationWeek, December 6, 2010; J. Vijayan, "The Grill: John Burke," Computerworld, September 13, 2010; J. Kobelius, "Agile Data Warehousing: Do You Scrum?" InformationWeek, July 21, 2010; www.ge.com, www.gehealthcare .com, www.rallydev.com, accessed March 17, 2013
Questions
1. Why is it so important that Imaging Solutions become more responsive and flexible? How does your answer to this question relate to Imaging Solutions moving to agile development?
2. Search for the phrase scope creep, and relate your findings to systems development in the Imaging Systems unit of GE. How would this phenomenon cause a problem in the acquisition and implementation of information systems?