'You can't copy culture' and other lessons learned introducing Agile at Booking.com Transport

There's no blueprint for success but approaches certainly can be replicated, says CTO Gavin Barton

Booking.com Transport is the semi-autonomous unit of the global travel site which deals with the ground transport, including the Rentalcars.com brand and airport taxi services. Headquartered in Manchester, it employs around 550 people in product and engineering, plus a number of contractors too. Gavin Barton is CTO, responsible for everything from data centres to software delivery, a role in which he works closely with colleagues on the product side. "I'm responsible for the 'how' and the chief product officer is responsible for the 'what'," he explains.

Barton joined Booking.com Transport in 2015 and since then has been pushing digital transformation through Agile, neither term of which he's particularly fond. In general business discourse, the word 'agile' has become so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless, while on the front line, engineers obsess over whether they are doing Scrum or Kanban, which is not helpful, he says. Words are important.

We used to say we're going to have Agile this and do Agile that, but now we just take the word ‘agile' out

"At the macro level we used to say we're going to have Agile this and do Agile that, but now we just take the word ‘agile' out. And at team level, we had an Agile Maturity Framework and now we've changed it to Team Maturity Framework since it's really about how a team operates. So, we've toned back the labelling."

Whichever words you care to use, Barton has developed a wealth of experience in bringing about the conditions that allow software to be delivered faster and more in line with the changing needs of customers, a little of which he shared with Computing following a recent DTX Talks Q&A.

Curiosity builds the app

Booking.com Transport has adopted a three-pronged approach to change: people, ways of working; and systems and technology.

The people side means obtaining and retaining the right skills, the former through apprenticeships, graduate schemes and outreach as well as more traditional channels, and the latter by ensuring engineers can move and grow in their roles.

The ‘ways of working piece' is about moving from a project-based to a product-based focus, where multifunctional teams work towards a particular output rather than existing as specialist units such as Testing, Business Analysis or UX. Barton talks about the importance of curiosity as an essential ingredient powering these internal startups.

We're trying to create an environment where people can be really curious

"We're trying to create an environment where people can be really curious, because the key part about being agile in business is that curiosity to find out what the customer needs, how the business operates, thinking about how to optimise processes, and so on."

Harnessing curiosity includes allowing engineers to go out as mystery shoppers to sample the experience of hiring a car themselves. As an approach, it means trusting their insights and also their ability to learn from their mistakes, he says.

"We really focus on building trust and empowerment into the organisation to get to a point where teams can really operate at a high level of speed and agility. At the same time, it's fine to fail, it's not a problem. The key thing is to learn from your mistakes and iterate, that's a key tenet of being agile."

But curious people tend to be curious about many things, tempted down many an interesting rabbit hole. How to keep everyone facing in the same direction?

"There's absolutely nothing wrong with governance, but the idea is that governance should be almost frictionless," he says. This is the approach we've been taking and these are the tools we use, but if you have another idea let's hear it.

Barton, emphasises the importance of framing. He dislikes the rigidity implied by 'standards', preferring the word 'default'.

"Rather than referring to standards, we say 'this is how we do it by default, but actually you can change it if you need to'. So, we allow the technology to change and evolve to solve the problem."

Some constraints are imposed naturally by the business cycle. Booking.com Transport conducts quarterly customer-needs reviews during which it tracks how objectives are being met against long term strategic plans. "The key thing is, we have a vehicle to collect those user needs we have the quarterly planning cycles to create a framework of where we are. And then we have a set of guardrails around defaults and frameworks to help to steer the teams, but ultimately I want the teams to use the best technology to solve the problem."

You can't copy culture

"You can't copy culture," Barton says. Every organisation comes from a different place and operates with a different set of imperatives and constraints, meaning a blueprint approach will likely fail. Nevertheless, there are elements that can be transferred from one business to another.

"The things you can copy are around trust and recognising that people are people, that's really important."

There's this worry that because you can't track everything, Agile means chaos

This is not as obvious as it sounds, because trust means letting go.

"There's this worry that because you can't track everything, Agile means chaos and losing control. But actually it's very structured, contrary to what a lot of people might believe."

Pace yourself

In the absence of an organisational hunger for Agile it will grind to a halt, taking a lot of goodwill and personal reputations with it. For some firms it's simply too early to change course, while others, Tigger-like, err in the opposite direction, trying to do too much too soon.

"When I first started in Transport, I was doing nearly 300 initiatives on improvements in the first year, then we nailed that down to about 12 things because it was just too much at once."

This was during the stabilisation stage, when Barton was trying to call in some "air cover", reorganising and regrouping making sure the systems and structures were capable of supporting the planned changes, pushing some services out to the cloud, consolidating, redefining roles.

While this was a lot of work, retaining a stable core is essential, he says, and that means rolling out changes in an ordered fashion, learning as you go.

"We have circa 90 teams in Transport and if we were changing direction on all IT teams every week it would be total chaos. As a total finger-in-the-air figure, you would not want to have more than a third of your business pivoting and shifting at any one time. I've done some stuff in the past where we moved every engineer and rotated all the teams around at the end of the month, and it took us another two months just to get stabilised, because teams take time to embed. So that didn't work very well. You've got to be careful with how much change you do before you lose control."

It's also important to recognise that some domains are naturally quicker to change than others. While a website or app may be updated many times a day, the natural pace of evolution of a payment system will be much more leisurely and so the approach must be different. "It just depends on the problem that trying to solve."

You build it, you run it, you own it

The 90 engineering teams in Transport focused on particular domains or problems. Containing up to eight members, each Agile team may be further clustered around product groups and product families - which are like business verticals. Product families are expected to manage with a high degree of autonomy, including selecting tools and technologies, running the code they create and managing their own costs.

The company operates mainly on AWS and while it retains some internal infrastructure, in part because it belongs to the wider Booking.com Group, has a cloud-first policy, Barton explains.

The goal is for every team to understand the cost of infrastructure and support it 24x7

"We are using the cloud for collaboration and we're driving something called a cell-based architecture, where the goal is for every team to understand the cost of infrastructure and support it 24x7. Many businesses worry about cloud and losing control of cost, and we've tried to embed that culture in terms of thinking about ownership, turning things off when you don't need them, scaling up, scaling down. We are embracing it quite heavily."

Riding out the pandemic

Currently with demand for hire cars and holidays in the doldrums, the entire unit has shifted to working from home and use has been made of the furlough scheme. Barton is now focused on the systems side, with the aim of coming out stronger when the crisis lifts.

"So, we've spent a lot of time embedding process and ways of working and now we've started on the technology stack. We don't have a lot of demand right now so actually we're going to be a bit more bold on some of the replatforming decisions and so were accelerating some of those things."