Summary

The Navigate program was setup to improve the IT Delivery for NAB Wholesale bank. Stephan implemented what he learned at CMG and delivered exceptional results.

Situation

There are ~600 IT People working at NAB Wholesale Banking servicing hundreds of IT applications. Wholesale banking deals with financial products from 25M and up, so needless to say, has high demands from its users.

Stephan had just completed the prestigious Pricing Centre project when a new standards team was assembled. He presented his experience from CMG to implement a "Bottom-up approach" to standardization. The presentation sparked excitement and Stephan was faced with the options to lead another high profile project or become standards manager.

Tasks

• Improve tools and processes for all IT Service Delivery.
• Measure improvements to prove success.

Actions

Stephan implemented internal communities and inspired them to improve "How we work" and setup the project management tools to orchestrate the improvements.

The communities were more or less formal, ranging from Community of Practices (CoP) which are very informal, the Process Improvement Teams (PIT) which are domain specific and the overarching Software Engineering Process Group, which is the formal body to approve the new standards.

Now... here's the kicker: As a standards group, we committed to never ever write a single standard ourselfs. In fact, our KPIs included: What standards are actually used and can we remove the rest? And what are the standards that we are missing that should be added.

Results

A lot of improvements have been delivered via Navigate, perhaps the videos below explain how it worked and how excited everyone is!

Process Improvements (Theory)

The achievements include (but are not limited to):

• Introduction to Agile in software delivery within the enterprise context. These results were presented at "Agile Australia".
• Introduction of Continuous Delivery practices including security architecture sign-off for automated deployments all the way into production..
• Agile progress tracking tools evaluation.
• Method Selection Guide (Industry Leading!!).
• Know where to store and find information by implementing a consistent knowledge look and feel across all Assets.

Implemented on projects (practice)

The improved practices are adopted by many teams which resulted in the achievements below (again, not limited to):

• Reduction of test time from 4 weeks to 4 hours. Not to speak of their decreased time to market!
• Reduction of number of high severity incidents by 60%.
• Bringing project environment start up from 3 months down to less than a day.
• Implemented self-service provisioning across all 43 environments for the Calypso team.
• The SCM Migration delivered significant yearly license saving and extra speed for developers: Developer integration time from 30+ minutes down to 30 seconds and an impressive 6% time waste removal across all 125 Developers
• The RDM team reduced package build times from 3 hours to 15 minutes.
• GMM deployment down from 4 hours to 40 minutes
• Diversification, eChannels, Agile VaR, are high profile project that used the NAVIGATE Improvements to deliver on time, under budget.
• New source control has meant: "more responsive IDE", "happier devs", "more time in the 'flow' "
• Migration of our large dev projects off ClearCase and onto Git has boosted productivity by 15 - 30 minutes per developer per day, decreased the turn-around time getting code changes built and deployed to test by several minutes per build, and greatly improved the morale and engagement level of the development team