Financial Service Programs: Improving delivery and quality through Agile tools and techniques
By applying a mix of agile processes and techniques, the throughput of task completions over time significantly improved by 400% – Kanban WIP method, while defect rates of work submitted for QA testing dropped from 30% to 5% over five months.
Changing provincial and federal regulatory compliance challenges caused this finance company to reinvent its custom-built systems. The EPMO & IT teams were prepared more for the maintenance of the current system rather than dealing with the complexities and challenges of having to develop new systems. This resulted in an overwhelming workload and schedule overrun measured in years. Project personnel had suffered through turnover of staff and technologies, requiring numerous restarts and integration challenges, and the basic business requirements needed to be re-initiated due to a lack of proper documentation. Little progress other than some “wireframe” models and discarded technologies had been realized.
One of our leading consultants was part of the team to lead the project work. His first recommendation was a “back to basics” approach, and this includes a full project review and the establishing project governance and planning stakeholder enagement. Then business requirements were then gathered to guide the project team. The first artefact was a “proof of concept” of the target system.
As part of the client operational maintenance, they had a license to Atlassian’s JIRA system; this license was leveraged and the team expanded JIRA’s use by creating workflows and tools to apply the agile approach to a new initiative.
To properly pace the development effort of the project work, a Kanban approach was introduced. This assisted project team in tracking deliveries, velocity and reporting progress to the project stakeholders. The workload assignment overloads in a department with the responsibility of supporting both new development effort and operational systems maintenance threatened to derail the project work; however, a work in progress (WIP) limits was introduced to help improve work throughput and management for the team.
Following numerous restarts and turnovers of staff and technologies over the five years before our involvement, the assigned consultant helped the PMO reorganize the development team to include project management, stakeholder governance, business analysis, and quality assistance. With a team of up to a dozen developers, the system was customized & redesigned and delivered to offices in four provinces as a production pilot in two years. The focus of the team is now on improving and developing systems in more provinces, taking into account complex differences in federal and provincial legal requirements.
Employing Kanban in JIRA, the throughput of task completions improved one in five hours of development time from about one task in 20 hours. Improved requirement specifications and QA participation in the planning stage also played a massive role in the improvements to throughput. Defect rates of work submitted for QA dropped from 30% to 5% over five months to the pilot deployment. Success rates and workflow are now monitored and measured regularly – weekly and monthly.
At some time, when some IT managers returned to a more waterfall workflow approach, rejection rates spiked, and throughputs significantly slowed. The governance structure was applied to bring work practices into conformance with the proven processes to demonstrate the value of a strong metrics and monitoring program.