A large European retail serves clients in the retail, private banking and corporate banking sectors with primary focus on Northwest Europe. The bank understands the need to keep innovating and improving both their products and their organization to stay ahead in the competition. With the disruption from the advent of fintechs and new age digital banks, traditional banking business models are necessarily undergoing a huge transformation. The need for faster delivery and value creation at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact has made ‘Agile ways of working’ a business imperative. Infosys has a long-term relationship with the bank and has partnered for over two years to achieve a successful transition to Agile DevOps.
Key Challenges
- Dynamic business expectations and customer habits with the ushering in of disruption from the advent of fintechs and new age digital banks
- Slow pace of change and a lengthy decision making process
- Rigid portfolio processes, impeding innovation
- Higher Cost Income Ratio than peers, with more players entering the industry
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The Solution
Focus on alignment, agility, adaptability, and collaboration as a method for transformation
- The ‘Fast Forward’ program was set up with a common theme “faster, better, and more enjoyable”. A partnership stream was formed where partners and client stakeholders would co-create transformation epics and MVPs
- To develop a fundamentally new way of working, a flatter organization was set up, based around grids and blocks aligned to business lines, so that work is brought to the team, not the team to the work
- Agile grids consist of blocks (fixed teams) with a similar mission that are maximally independent, multidisciplinary, and end-to-end responsible for a system
- Blocks use Scrum as their way of working. The relevant business areas provide the block’s product owners while IT provides the IT engineers (developers and QA) and scrum masters
- Grids and blocks plan and align their deliveries through various gatherings including the grid sync and Scrum of Scrums
- Agile coaches from Infosys aligned with Agile Transformation Office at the client’s place to onboard 120+ teams to Agile DevOps way of working. This was facilitated by organizing boot camps across locations via eight-week coaching waves, with key agile practices orchestrated using Jira and Confluence
State of the art Agile ODC set up at locations in India (Pune and Mysore) to facilitate distributed agile having the salient features listed below:
- Restructuring of workspaces with digital displays and writable walls to encourage people interactions and collaborative work culture
- Dedicated rooms equipped with always-on video conferencing facility to communicate with remote teams for key agile events
- Workstations equipped with webcams and headsets for each team member to communicate seamlessly
The Infosys Integrated Approach
IT4IT organization was set up for handling the change management associated with CI/CD program and this involved:
- Paving the way: Set up conditions for the teams to get working by implementing tools and standard pipelines across tech stacks along with the infrastructure prerequisites
- Make it happen: Actual implementation by coaching the agile teams on changes in the way of working and simplifying the processes
- Implemented automated test data management along with governance and test service virtualization
- Defining the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Confluence, and Jira Portfolio) along with the standard way of working
- Key tools identified: Jenkins for Continuous Integration, XL Release and XL Deploy for release / deployment management, SonarQube for code quality, HP Fortify for secure coding, and Selenium and UFT for automated testing
Benefits
Improved business agility with cycle time reduction of 66%
Focus on customer value in identifying, prioritizing, and implementing change
Focused coaching for blocks in multiple grids across locations
Reduced costs associated with change initiatives, while maintaining throughput
