This is the final post in a short series describing the four themes from the APNIC 2021 Activity Plan, and what they have meant for the APNIC membership and community during this year. You can read the other posts in the series here.
Everyone who works in the Internet industry knows about the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of change that we are already used to in our environment.
When APNIC began planning for 2021, we knew that to meet our goals, we’d need to deal with the unpredictable impacts of the pandemic, and be prepared to adapt quickly to address the needs of the membership and community. Hence, the fourth theme in our 2021 Activity Plan is APNIC Agility.
APNIC has been using Agile methods in software development for several years, and in 2020 we extended Agile across our new product teams and processes. This has continued into 2021, to support early and continuous improvement, and to help adapt to changes we have been facing.
Also in 2021, Agile methods have been adapted to non-technical teams at APNIC. While the needs of teams differ, many methods and common tools can be applied and adopted to achieve similar benefits. At the same time, using Agile across the whole organisation facilitates collaboration across all activities, improves accountability and workload distribution, and helps avoid silos.
In 2021, greater agility has helped APNIC to adapt to both remote and hybrid work during COVID lockdowns, and to avoid negative impacts on productivity and service quality. We have maintained high service satisfaction and quality because Members and the community continue to have a consistent, positive experience when dealing with APNIC services.
Some examples of the activity focused on user experience in 2021, driven by Agile methods, include:
- Common system architectures and testing infrastructure to identify and squash software bugs
- Performance, stability, and user interface improvements to information products such as DASH, NetOX, and the newly renamed Resource Explorer (or ‘REx’; previously known as the Internet Directory)
- More language support added to APNIC Academy
- New chat functionality and a streamlined log-in experience for conference websites
- A new SSO architecture coming this quarter
Measuring the impact of these improvements is underway, with the collection of user feedback on all APNIC services to evaluate performance and fix issues that are identified.
You can track the progress of APNIC’s 2021 activities at any time by visiting the 2021 Activity Tracker. All success measures outlined in the plan are here, with an at-a-glance indication of progress and results so far. The tracker is updated as the year progresses.
As I mentioned, agility is the fourth and final theme in APNIC’s 2021 Activity Plan. If you missed my earlier posts on the other three themes, they were:
I hope this series of posts has been useful. If you have questions and feedback for APNIC, please do get in touch via the Helpdesk, use the comments section below, or join the mailing lists to have your say.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.