Agile CX Enhancement – GDCI × NTTI × NDID for Cross Connect Portal

1. Background and Motivation

Indonesia, holding over 280 million of population, is one of the most growing markets on the globe. Jakarta is becoming an epicenter of its digital services with strong demands on ICT platforms. GDC Indonesia (GDCI) and NTT Indonesia (NTTI) has been operating 3 data centers in Jakarta and surrounding suburban area while managing 200+ enterprise clients in total. One of its key services is called "Cross-Connect" which activates rack to rack connectivity for the servers located in operating data centers. As it requires superior integrity for end-to-end implementation to ensure connections, configurations, and service status, the lead time from accepting orders to complete delivery has become a concern in the customer experience. To overcome this challenge, GDCI and NTTI teamed up with NTT DATA Indonesia (NDID) in a scrum team for the implementation of fully digitalized customer experience through "Cross Connect Portal" while streamlining existing procedure through a thorough experience observation.

2. How a Joint Agile Team Works

The scrum team, composed of the product owner, scrum master, developers, is a delegated collective to pursue the value of the delivered product. Mr. Ryuji Toyama from NTT Indonesia, collaborated and led product development, looks back. "NTTI and GDCI, as teams of experts to sell, operate, manage data center services, needs to propose a value from another dimension with customer experience enhancement as the market gaining agility. Even though our services are oriented towards B to B business model and could be considered as a tailor-made service, we should not give up the room for improvement with digitalized user journey."
Guided by this product vision, GDCI, NTTI and NDID team jointly formulated a scrum team to tackle the product delivery and verification in 2-week sprint cycle.
As the market demands transform rapidly, unlike traditional waterfall delivery where delivery team clarifies all the expected requirements upfront, the team carefully structured current clients' user story, existing internal operation process, and identified what sprint increments potentially gives a critical impact for product value of Cross Connect Portal throughout the sprints. The team established an interactive sprint board to manage constantly shifting priority of the backlog by market expectation and value delivery velocity of the scrum team.

Photo: Sprint Board

Sprint goal setting requires diverse professionality to validate it. For example, a product owner needs to constantly communicate with the sales team to gain insight into client demands, with the delivery team to clarify the current and possible future business flow, and most importantly, with management leadership to keep track the financial status and investment expense and expected outcome from the activities. Besides, within a limited delivery velocity, a scrum master is obliged to provide the insights as he/she needs to drive sprints with possible best optimized outcome for the product communicating with the scrum team. Furthermore, developers' viewpoint is also crucial because they must implement possible best "how" for incorporating the backlog to the product from the viewpoint of computer science expertise.
Zul Achmad, the scrum master highlights the key success factor to function joint team.
"What is often misunderstood about scrum or agile is, people think this is just a framework of delivery. Those people just regard that they are doing scrum or agile just by having ceremonial events, such as daily standup, sprint planning, sprint review in a short-term delivery cycle. Essential point here is that scrum or agile is actually a way to better pursuing product value with deep commitment and insight from multiple expertise from shared value foundation."
Under the new operating model consists of NTT DATA Japan Corporation engaging in Japan domestic business, NTT DATA Inc for oversea business, NTT DATA Corporation as a holding company, GDCI, NTTI and NDID started to work even closely after 2023 under the same aspiration to become a full stack IT solution provider. Beginning with management level communication, joint initiative cases have been generated from collaboration in the sales and the delivery field. This fostered our mutual understanding on the primary value foundation of each party, which was the key for accelerating Cross Connect Portal development.

3. What We Achieved

After 8 sprints of delivery and verification, Cross Connect portal officially published for public use. The team succeeded in building up significantly enhanced user experience backed up by digitalized end to end service delivery; Average delivery time has been shortened from 150 hours to 60 hours. Manual communication process in the incumbent procedure, which was dependent upon individuals, has been eliminated. Comprehensive transparency of service status became available to the clients.
"To address growing demands on the service, power of digitalization is playing crucial role in GDC Indonesia" says Mr. Yuki Tsutsumi, a manager at data center service product team. "There are boundaries between us and client. Furthermore, it is also applicable in our internal organization, such as sales, delivery, support, and management. Cross Connect portal crashed that walls with the excellence of usability. What's more to add here, as digitalization gets critical in customer satisfaction and service level, this implementation gave our team confidence to keep up with the growing market upon agility. We believe we can achieve more with this sort of collaboration."

Photo: Cross Connect Portal Screen

Now, having 100+ clients onboard to the platform, Cross Connect Portal keeps bridging clients and organization seamlessly.

4. Implications for Further Collaboration Synergy

Adopting new organizational formation, GDCI, NTTI and NDID strongly believe the synergy contributes group-wide competitive strength with an agile, outcome-oriented way of business. As represented by Cross Connect Portal development, either for external clients or internally, now we can tackle the challenges leveraging each core competitiveness. Together, we will make strides even more confidently.