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Agile & DevOps Mindset

Agile & DevOps Mindset

Today, every successful financial institution is a software company at heart.

Building competitive advantage through swift and responsive software development is as important as any core business function.

To stay competitive on the market, many companies are currently undergoing Agile transformations.

Decision makers in the 14th state of the Agile report cite 2 main reasons for adopting Agile practices.

 

Despite the trust put into Agile methodologies, many companies are not meeting those objectives. There are two reasons for this:

  • Applying Agile practices and terminology on a surface level, without changing the actual behaviour of the organisation.
  • Focusing on an Agile organisation's management practices, while ignoring the most impactful aspects of Agile – scope definition and management, as well as advanced engineering and infrastructure practices.

 

 

To achieve tangible business results, organisations need to change their structure and IT, as well as perfect processes and tools used for development. They need to choose the most impactful aspects of Agile and DevOps methodologies and tailor them to their business realities. Only then can real business value be delivered to the customer.

 

Companies that incorporate Agile&DevOps internally experience following advantages:

 

 

Sollers Consulting supports financial institutions in their Agile and DevOps journey. We know that banks and insurance companies are operating in highly regulated environments which means they need to take different approaches to shorten their Time-to-Market than most other companies in different sectors.

Our Customers increase the speed and frequency at which they delivery value, by adopting an Agile Culture.

Scope management and product management:

  • Together we analyse and assess the ongoing and planned project portfolio, considering the big picture and interdependencies.
  • We help in effective scope management before the project, but also on an ongoing basis, during development.
  • Our customers break down large goals into small, valuable tasks that can be delivered early.
  • They present planned functionality in transparent and frequently adjusted backlogs and roadmaps.
  • They learn to apply an iterative approach to complex initiatives, including regulatory, greenfield or system migration.

Teams’ empowerment:

  • Our customers empower teams to work together towards a common goal.
  • We educate them on how to ensure that every team member understands the team’s goal and vison.
  • They encourage teams to make decisions,
  • And give them space for continuous improvement.

Organisational design with the goal of increasing cooperation:

 

  • Our customers increase the level of cooperation between business and IT.
  • Their business is involved at every stage of the development lifecycle.
  • They simplify their IT structures through trust and delegation of responsibility.
  • We help them build structures that break silos and make arising issues transparent.
  • Outcome-based measures are adopted that provide clear and actionable insights.
organisation design

Ultimately,  the point is frequent releasing of valuable software. No significant progress can be made without adjusting the software development process and tools itself and adopting the DevOps mindset.

Building targeted Software Development Lifecycle processes focused on:

  • Increasing cooperation between teams engaged in the further steps of delivery.
  • Reducing manual hand-offs as well as unnecessary paperwork.
  • Designing the entire SDLC process to shorten lead time and feedback loop.

Streamlining IT Governance that:

  • Re-models and streamlines governance processes to better fit into the Agile way of delivery.
  • Removes silos between supervising entities to ensure a smooth information flow and consistency of the entire supervision.
  • Puts governance requirements into the development tools to release teams from the burden of numerous manual checks and avoids human error.
white stairs against orange wall

Quality based on: 

  • Quality gates enabling to maintain high software quality in the whole organisation;
  • Tools that enable the team to identify errors at the early stage of product development;
  • Testing strategy (functional and non-functional testing) in order to provide foundation for further automatization;
  • Promoting the “shift-left” approach, which aims to get a response message about ready and in progress products as soon as possible.

Infrastructure and toolset on-premises/ Cloud built around:

 

  • A tool platform to provide teams with self-sufficiency
  • Pre-configured components to speed up the creation of environments or project setup.
  • Practices like Infrastructure as a Code or Configuration as a Code to support both on premises and Cloud approaches.
  • Ability to shift the cost of computing resources from long-term CAPEX to demand-driven OPEX.

In a situation where a client is considering moving to the Cloud, we help to tailor and design a solution that makes the most of the advantages offered by a Cloud-based approach and allows for a smooth transition.

 

Learn more about how to combine and operationalise SDLC with IT Governance as well as underlying infrastructure in Sollers Platform Automation.

Leading Polish PC Insurer (INSIS) INSIS PC with a custom Front-End. Over 10 environments plus Production, all on on-premise. Fully automated code deployment with QA process made the release cycle significantly faster.
See case study
Leading International Insurer in Japan

Guidewire InsuranceSuite© integrated with Front-End Portals and big infrastructure: hybrid deployment utilising cloud and on-premise. Fully automated code deployment made the release cycle significantly faster. Project infrastructure utilising container platform concepts, provides a stable, quick and robust deployment platform.
See case study
Leading British Insurer Guidewire PolicyCenter©, ClaimCenter© and large infrastructure: 40 non-Prod environments, many points of integration. Migration to an AWS Cloud and automation of the process made it possible to decrease the time of run of new test environment from 2 months to 1 hour. Automated code analysis combined with part-automated tests significantly increased the quality of the deployed code and reduced time of tests.
See case study
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Michał Piotrowicz
Infrastructure Leader

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