Trainline CTO Mark Holt: Digital transformation is all about constantly 'iterating' apps, features and services

Strip processes down to the essentials, organise around small, empowered teams - and dump legacy Oracle tech and shift to the cloud, suggests Holt

Everyone has heard of Amazon, but what's the second biggest ecommerce site in the UK?

With £3.2 billion in revenue in 2018, it's almost certainly Trainline, through which 172,000 passengers every day travel with tickets bought using the Trainline app and website.

And, like Amazon, Trainline's growth has been fuelled not just by IT and not just by digital transformation, but by regularly developing new features and services, and improving on them every day, guided by end-user focused metrics, missions and KPIs.

That's according to Trainline chief technology officer Mark Holt, presenting at Computing's IT Leader's Summit last week.

Constantly iterating is the key, says Holt, citing as an example, Trainline's implementation of chat/voice recognition to answer users' questions.

"Our voice and chat capability is based on the Google Assistant technology... We spent quite a lot of time figuring out what we believed people were going to ask: ‘What time is my train going? Where's my ticket? Is my train delayed?'

"What we got was questions about changing bank details and complaints about noise in quiet carriages! Only 16 per cent of the chats on day one were recognisable - it was almost comical."

However, building on that, learning from mistakes and from what customers really wanted from such a feature, and doing that over and over means that, today, a significant proportion of app chats are deflecting queries that would have ended up in a contact centre, said Holt. As a result, not only has customer service been improved, but the feature also helps to contain costs.

"That's the point: it's all about setting something up and constantly iterating on it," said Holt. "Keep chipping away. This is my motto… it works on lots of different levels. You start by figuring out where you want to go and as long as you're making a little bit of progress every single day towards the big things you are trying to achieve you're moving forward.

Have we moved a little bit forward this week? [It's about being] one per cent better this week, one per cent better next week and so on. And by the end of the year you'll be fricking awesome."

Underlying that shift towards a constantly iterating culture was a digital transformation that the company underwent from 2014, shifting IT from the company's own data centre into the cloud, enabling more IT resources to be focused on development, said Holt, while cutting capital expenditure.

That coincided with a major re-architecting of the way in which Trainline's IT works, he added.

"In 2014, we had a big, monolithic architecture. Now, we have more than 500 micro-services; we have production releases at least 300 times per week - we're constantly iterating - but many weeks it's above 400."

As a result, over the past five years, the proportion of developers in Trainline's IT function has grown from 38 per cent of staff to 60 per cent, based on the belief that it is developers that add the most value to the business. "I do not add value from a tech perspective because I'm not writing code," said Holt.

That digital transformation meant migrating from a technology stack based around a "nasty, legacy Oracle database" to basing applications on the most appropriate data store on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The aim wasn't just to liberate the company from software licensing, but to enable it to be more flexible in terms of its business processes. "If you're stuck in a big, legacy Oracle technology stack then you're kind of screwed from a process point of view."

Freed from monolithic architectures, added Holt, Trainline was able to chip away at its processes in order to streamline them as much as possible, reducing cost and enabling staff to do more.

"From a process perspective, it's all about efficiency. We've constantly chipped away at our process and taken as many things out as we possibly can to make it as fast as possible and to get better at doing it.

"So, we used to do nine releases a year - we sucked at releasing. We used to do big, heavy releases that went ‘thunk', and it was awful. Now, we're really, really good at releasing - we do it [at least] 300 times a week. We're excellent at it; world class.

"We keep chipping away at multiple levels, taking things away that aren't adding value.

"Lean talks about eliminating waste. Waste is anything that the customer wouldn't pay for. Actually, if you optimise your process for time-to-market - how you can get things to market as quickly as possible - then you'll always be doing the right thing in terms of eliminating waste," said Holt.

That meant that Trainline could cut out such roles or activities as project managers, change approval boards, architecture governance boards, and pure support functions.

"We used to have an architecture governance board that sat once a week. Developers would turn up, bow and scrape, put their documents down, and the architecture governance board would go ‘NO!'

"And they would be expected to come back the following week - a whole week lost by someone not being very helpful."

The company also used to have a "massive support operation", which tended to slow things down by highlighting the problems that a new deployment might cause, rather than considering the opportunities it presented and how it would be improved with continual iteration.

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Trainline CTO Mark Holt: Digital transformation is all about constantly 'iterating' apps, features and services

Strip processes down to the essentials, organise around small, empowered teams - and dump legacy Oracle tech and shift to the cloud, suggests Holt

Along with the philosophy that it is developers that primarily add value within IT organisations, Trainline also re-organised around teams containing people with a range of complementary skills.

"We organise in very small teams, around business problems and major architectural domains. In major architectural domains we have teams looking after key capabilities: Apps, dWeb, fulfilment, payments. Those are all big, architectural domains, and each one of those teams are responsible for that whole domain," said Holt.

"All of our teams are small - on average somewhere around four of five; and we also have product owners, quality assurance, some design, analysts, possibly some marketing people - all in one team, physically co-located. There's nothing quite like putting people around a table and asking them to solve a problem. It changes the mindset completely - it's one of the biggest things you can do."

It also cuts down on the sniping between different domains, such as between developers, product managers and marketers, added Holt.

They're also autonomous. "They're as autonomous as we can possibly make them. One of the ways that we got from a big, monolithic architecture to a micro-services architecture is by creating the teams around the architectural domains that we wanted."

Teams, furthermore, are responsible for everything within their domains and always on-call, providing strong incentives to get roll-outs right.

"Each team is responsible for making sure that their ‘stuff' works. There's nothing quite like being woken up at 3am three days on the trot as a developer to make you fix your code", said Holt.

And that ‘everything' also includes security, with the company providing extra training to developers to improve their understanding of security and secure coding practices, with at least one member of the team having responsibility for security.

"Then we do what Netflix call ‘the paved road', which means that we make it super-easy for teams to follow the sorts of standards that we want them to follow: how we deploy software, how our build pipelines work. None of this stuff is strictly mandated… but we try and make it so easy that everybody wants to do it that way.

"Each team is in control of their own destiny; they are able to make things happen."

They're also focused on a measurable business outcomes. Back-end teams looking after search, for example, have a measurable business outcome based on sales conversions off from the search page. Measurable business outcomes are typically based on end-user metrics rather than internal metrics.

On top of that, Trainline teams also have ‘missions' to focus on particular problems or challenges.

For example, in the contact centre there is a push towards what the company calls Simple Self Serve with the aim of reducing the number of inbound to the contact centre. "Customers shouldn't really have to contact a contact centre - it means that we've failed. Everything should be there [in the app or on the website] and ready for them," said Holt.

To that end, Trainline tries to push as much functionality into its website and app as possible so that customers don't need to call a contact centre, and it's the team's job to figure out how that can be done to make it straightforward for users.

At the same time, though, each teams have ‘guard rail KPIs that they can't break covering performance, quality and server costs to ensure that solutions don't impact other key aspects of Trainline's service and business.

"But the hardest part of all? Getting out of the way," said Holt.

Quite simply, after organising teams, providing missions and ‘guard rail KPIs', the organisation simply needs to let them get the job done. "We're all control freaks, but you've got to let your people get on."

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