Agile & DevOPs Assessment Case Study

Global Financial Service Organisation

A global financial services company embarking on a programme of work to move from traditional on-premise, in-house software products to cloud-provisioned Software as a Service (SaaS) products was looking for a partner to carry out an end-to-end assessment of its current Agile and DevOps capabilities across all appropriate software product and development teams.

 

The end goal is to move all in-house-developed software products onto a globally governed Agile and DevOps framework, providing consistent, effective, and frequent releases for all software products developed across the organisation.

Engagement

The engagement started with our lead consultant working with the Software Product, Development, and DevOps teams across all in-scope business units to understand how the teams currently build, deploy, and support each software product, along with the day-to-day challenges and potential improvement opportunities.

During the Discovery Phase, several key challenges were identified, which were captured and will be explored in more detail as part of the maturity assessment phase. These challenges included the following:

    • Team Structure: The organisation has several product and software development teams that are siloed, working in isolation and with regional or global reporting lines.
    • Methodology: The teams use various methods for planning and deploying software releases, including Waterfall and Agile methodologies, which are often conflicting.
    • Tooling: The teams use different tools to capture user requirements, product backlogs, software development, and defect and bug management.
    • Testing: Different testing standards, tools, techniques, test coverage and levels of automation are in place across the organisation.
    • Release Frequency: Product teams have different strategies for releasing new software products. Varying from daily to bi-weekly to six-week releases.

Approach

Once the initial Discovery Phase was complete, the engagement focused on a full maturity assessment of the organisation’s Agile and DevOps capabilities, covering the following key topics and example questions.

    Culture and Organisation

      • Are Agile and DevOps practices and working methods rolled out across the organisation?
      • What training and development opportunities are provided to employees to enhance their Agile and DevOps skills?
      • How are teams working with Agile and DevOps practices currently organised, e.g., by component, feature, product, or cross-functional?

    Initiation and Strategy

      • What is the IT and product strategy, vision, business goals, direction?
      • How aligned are the business, product, and IT strategies across the organisation?

    Governance and Finance

      • What governance and funding models are in place?
      • What is the financial decision-making process?

    Design and Architecture

      • What software delivery framework(s) are in place across the organisation?
      • What architectural archetypes have been implemented across the organisation, e.g. Microservices, containers?

    Build and Deployment

      • What levels of automation are in place across the build and deployment environments?
      • What is the software release process, cycle, and frequency?

    Test and Verification

      • What test types are in place across the different product teams, e.g. unit, system, integration testing and what is the test code coverage?
      • What levels of automation are in place for each type of test and software product?

    Service and Operations

      • How well aligned are the Agile and DevOps processes with the service management (e.g. ITIL) processes used within the organisation?
      • Have roles and responsibilities been defined across all Software Product, Delivery, DevOps, and Service Teams?

    Information and Reporting

      • What key metrics are regularly captured and reported on across the organisation?
      • What levels of real time reporting are in place across all of the different software products?

    Deliverables

    Upon completion of the maturity assessment, the final stages of the engagement included creating two main deliverables.

    Detailed Management Report – Covering all key observations, scoring against each discipline, details of low and high maturity and recommendations to support the client’s objectives to move all in-house developed software products onto a globally governed Agile and DevOps framework.

    Improvement Roadmap –This roadmap details all short-term, medium-term, and long-term actions that can feed into a business case for change, capturing all key elements, such as Organisation and design, Roles and responsibilities, Processes, and Tooling, aligned with the proposed recommendations. The roadmap was further broken down into eight individual workstreams covering all the individual improvement actions for each assessment discipline.

        The client engagement and completion of the Agile and DevOps maturity assessment resulted in several key benefits and value outcomes, including:

          • Providing the client with a clear understanding of what good looks like for an organisation with highly mature Agile and DevOps capabilities and the required steps to achieve an industry-recommended benchmark for maturity.
          • Identification key challenges and gaps across all of the product, development, DevOps, service teams, and functions involved in delivering in-house-developed software products.
          • Identification of variations in Agile and DevOps processes and capabilities across all business units globally.
          • Identifying improvement opportunities that will provide the most significant cost savings for the client.
          • Improvement roadmap and recommendations to provide valuable inputs into the client’s business case for moving all in-house developed software products onto a globally governed Agile and DevOps framework.
          • Ensuring recommendations and improvement opportunities align with the business strategy and goals.

        Outcomes

        The client engagement and completion of the Agile and DevOps maturity assessment resulted in several key benefits and value outcomes, including:

          • Providing the client with a clear understanding of what good looks like for an organisation with highly mature Agile and DevOps capabilities and the required steps to achieve an industry-recommended benchmark for maturity.
          • Identification key challenges and gaps across all the product, development, DevOps, service teams, and functions involved in delivering in-house-developed software products.
          • Identification of variations in Agile and DevOps processes and capabilities across all business units globally.
          • Identifying improvement opportunities that will provide the biggest cost savings for the client.
          • Improvement roadmap and recommendations to provide valuable inputs into the client’s business case for moving all in-house developed software products onto a globally governed Agile and DevOps framework.
          • Ensuring any recommendations and improvement opportunities align with the overall business strategy and goals.

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