Improving Quality & Productivity: Delivery & Deployment Uplift for Australian bank
Utilising an automated CI/CD pipeline we helped the organisation increase innovation in a complex environment.
Automated CI/CD pipieline
Solution
Financial Services
Industry
Our customer is an Australian direct bank based in Melbourne, Victoria. It is owned by a consortium of 26 industry superannuation funds, and provides internet and mobile banking services for over 500,000 customers nationwide.
Business challenge
The bank operates without a high street presence, with all customer transactions managed via an application that supports Online and Mobile banking channels. This application is developed by an external vendor and then integrated, tested, implemented and supported operationally by the Online Banking team (OB1) and their service providers.
A range of issues presented:
- Teams were geographically separated from each other and were working serially, in a ‘stop-start’ manner without end to end visibility and coordination. This made resourcing needs and delivery dates difficult to predict.
- New features and updates from the Developer had to be manually integrated into the code base, and then manually packaged and tested prior to manual deployment. This process was complex with only a few staff members able to execute it properly and any quality issues with delivered code could only be detected at the end of the integration process.
These limitations added to the lead time required to implement changes, and meant that OB1 were becoming a bottleneck. The reliance on manual processing also introduced quality and consistency issues, which impacted on solution confidence, and required additional testing and remediation.
The complexity of the environment was also a key factor. Aside from the delivery team, there were also a significant number of internal and external stakeholders involved. This mixed mode of operation had the propensity for confusion and reduced confidence in the cause of failures and issues.
Furthermore, at an enterprise level, the business was in a state of transition as it moved from a functional-based to a line of business-based model, which added a level of complexity.
Solution
The bank engaged Cevo to uplift the delivery capabilities of the OB1 Team to help overcome the above mentioned challenges and reduce key risk around delivery.
Cevo worked with the team to:
- Provide initial capacity to clear the backlog of changes
- Uplift the integration and deployment capabilities using a mixture of agile coaching and process improvement and technology automation.
The engagement took place in an incremental, triaged manner over the course of 9 months. Importantly, the project was not about throwing out existing tools, process and procedure. The team already had substantial production responsibilities and were well formed with respect to collaboration and dedication. Rather, the focus throughout the project was providing an improved approach to technology delivery and preparing and planning for the project upgrade whilst providing technical and cultural guidance to further evolve and enable the OB1 team.
Outcomes
As a result of this project our customer has improved visibility of work in progress, improved communication and collaboration between teams as well as an automated CI/CD pipeline. This has had a significant impact on quality, team efficiency and productivity, whilst also reducing risk.
A new online release strategy has enabled the team to deploy new features and updates to production at any time, without outages impacting on customer experience, which is of paramount importance as a retail banking organisation.
Throughout the engagement, there were key deliverables that helped the organisation increase innovation in a complex environment. At the beginning of the project, the delivery team was constrained in a very waterfall and heavily reactive in their environment. In working closely together, Cevo was able to drive the team culture to be more agile, impacting a shift in the broader organisation in the process.
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