Over the past 12 months, Rightmove’s IT team has been on a journey, one that is taking us from a traditional IT function focused on back office support, to a more proactive, product-enabled, user-focussed IT team. It’s been a year of bold moves, big ideas and ambitious OKRs. As we reflect on the past year, and look at how far we’ve come, something that’s glaringly obvious is how much learning has taken place. What’s more, we’re only just getting started!
It all started with a basic set of principles
My job title might seem a bit absurd to some. “IT Product Manager”?! Does IT even lend itself to product principles?! Well, whilst it may not seem intuitive upon first consideration, we applied product principles to a traditional IT set-up and it paid off.
First, we painted a picture. IT should be a function that deeply understands its users, iterates quickly, delivers tangible value and is acknowledged for doing so by the business.
Then, we embraced data. We didn’t just look at dashboards, metrics and SLAs, but we gathered meaningful insights from a host of different sources that helped us target strategic areas for improvement. We conducted analysis into our Wifi networks and identified key faults in the London office. Once fixed, Wifi related tickets went down drastically. We listened when our Customer Experience team told us our phones were not fit for purpose and decided to modernise our telephony platform. We also responded when our users said they’d love more insight into our world by publishing a monthly newsletter. Sometimes, even the small changes can have a big impact.
Lastly, we embedded agile ways of working – not overnight, but steadily. We started using Jira, mapped our initiatives to OKRs, and broke these initiatives down so we could work on them in sprints. Sprints started to be planned, and we started sticking to the plan. It was in this way that we made a shift into intentional, goal-driven delivery.
Building momentum
With a mindset shift comes new opportunity, with new opportunity comes learning potential, and all of these combined resulted in a shift in the team’s capabilities. We invested in team development and hired new talent, creating a mix that helped to further embed these new ways of working. We leaned into cloud-first thinking and modernized our infrastructure though a new VPN, placing our servers onto the Cloud and moving to Cloud Telephony. We started to say goodbye to legacy, and hello to the future.
Our collaboration approach has changed dramatically over the last year. Not only have we started collaborating better as a team, running retros and daily stand ups, but we changed how we collaborate with other teams across the business. We implemented processes to track changes and incidents, and made sure we were better equipped to handle them moving forward. We also transformed how the business collaborates by modernising meeting rooms, refreshing devices and working with security to ensure all Rightmove data remains safe.
Measuring what matters
We’re starting to ask ourselves how we can measure the important stuff. Not just uptime or ticket counts, but HOW our users experience IT.
How supported and empowered do Rightmovers feel? What is their experience of the IT Help Desk?
We have discovered that to empower our colleagues to do the best work of their lives, we must measure service quality through the lens of user satisfaction, and embed this into our reporting.
We now have 4 goals we are collectively working toward:
- empowering a culture of high performance and efficiency
- delivering a seamless, digital workplace experience
- enabling a culture of continuous, cross-functional collaboration, and
- building secure and scalable enterprise technology foundations
What’s next for IT?
Yes, we have done a lot. But, we still have a lot to do and even more ideas on the horizon. It’s only been a year, so it should come as no surprise that some traditional infrastructure remains. Rome wasn’t built in a day after all.
However, the note I want to end on is that our direction is clear:
more collaboration, enhanced productivity and a relentless focus on user experience.
The journey has not been perfect by any means. There were bumps, tight timelines and moments of disruption.
But through it all, the team has shown an unbelievable amount of resilience and determination. They have been willing to challenge themselves, and it is this embracing of a steep learning curve that has brought us this far.
We couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve achieved – and even more excited about what lies ahead.
