Development Team Lead
Company: National Australia Bank
Jul 2008 - Feb 2010
https://www.nab.com.au/corporate
Abstract:
NAB needed a flexible, web-delivered application to help its institutional banking staff structure and estimate returns on large and complex transactions. This was NAB's first Agile project.
Commenced as Senior Developer on the project and was soon promoted to Technical Project Lead in the first 6 months.
Implemented many DevOps practices in a Highly Regulated environment (Application was handling $400M deals).
Managed a team of 5 people on this high-profile project.
Worked with senior managers to set benchmark and showcases every 3 weeks to senior stakeholders and program manager.
Worked with the PMO and standards to provide appropriate reporting and governance.
The project was delivered above expectation, on time and well within budget.
Because Pricing Centre was the first to go live GLOBALLY with Silverlight RTM, Microsoft published a whitepaper about the success.
Situation
NAB needed a flexible, web-delivered application to help its institutional banking staff structure and estimate returns on large and complex transactions. This was NAB's first Agile project.
Tasks
The PricingCentre project set out to replace a legacy calculation engine to calculate ROI, ROE on the fly when constructing large banking deals. The new system was built using .NET, Win2003 server, WCF, SQL Server 2005 and not to forget Silverlight!
Silverlight is a powerful development tool for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web and mobile applications. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and operating systems, bringing a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works.
As said, Pricing Centre was built using cutting-edge technologies and was the first application to go live (globally!) using the Silverlight 2.0 RTM version, merely hours after being released by Microsoft. This meant deploying the SilverLight runtime on all 1000+ PCs across the banking organisation worldwide, which required considerable amounts of planning and seeking approvals.
Actions
Stephan led the team of developers, testers and BAs to deliver the application on time, within budget with very happy end users.
The project was executed using the Agile Method, which was unique at the time for NAB. Only a select few projects were allowed to "give Agile a try" and pricing centre was one of them. Even though the team had to go through a learning curve of what everyone meant by Agile, they soon managed to align their expectations and deliver exceptionally good software to the end users.
Extensive automated testing was applied to verify the pricing calculations were all correct. Overnight the software had to endure hours of automated UI tests and the full suite of all existing production deals were run through the old pricing calculator and through the new one, so inconsistencies would be noticed. Deployments were 90% automated as organisational policies prevented more automation.
Results
The success of the project even reached Microsoft's attention as they offered to write a case study about the project. Please see the Downloads section to view it.