Company: National Australia Bank

Feb 2010 - Aug 2014

https://www.nab.com.au/corporate

Situation

NAVIGATE is the Continuous Improvement program of Wholesale Banking Technology department within National Australia Bank. Stephan was the first strategist to join this team to implement a bottom-up approach, rather than the traditional top-down approach where standards are imposed on people.

The situation was that the previous standards group was dismantled and a new group was created to take its place. The newly appointed manager ran a presentation asking for people's input on how to "do it differently". Stephan, having worked intensively on process improvement at LogicaCMG, put his hand up and shared his views. Having been burned by the previous standards group, the new manager was more open-minded and hired Stephan for his team on the spot.

Tasks

His goal was to setup and maintain a successful Process Improvement Infrastructure (PII) where a culture of continuous improvement was to be created.

Actions

He had the opportunity to start a green field approach to process improvement by selecting tools and processes that would be far more agile and lean than seen before in other organisations. He had plenty of inspiration from frameworks like Kaizen, Six Sigma, Lean Startup, etc., but was amazed by the lack of technology tools to support process improvement programs.

A temporary infrastructure based on SP2007 was set up, but it lacked fundamental features like history and audit trails, and created a usability nightmare to keep up to date.

Stephan also brought over the peer-to-peer training model he had run inside LogicaCMG's Resu!t Centre SEPG. Every process improvement needs the people who will use it to be told what the new process is and trained on it, and the Process Improvement Teams (the NAB equivalent of the Resu!t Centre process areas) were the natural people to do the teaching. Members of each PIT ran the training for their own standards, which kept the content authoritative and the cost low.

Results

The project name for the improvement program was NAVIGATE, as we were often navigating uncharted waters!

Two and a half years into the program, it has reached a 20% participation rate, has delivered over a 100 improvements, each ranging from tiny to gigantic in terms of effort and in delivered value.

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 and Agile VaR are high-profile projects that used the NAVIGATE improvements to deliver on time and 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

Stephan managed to inspire the internal communities to keep improving their processes even through tough times of restructuring. The peer-to-peer training structure, delivered by the Process Improvement Teams themselves, reduced training cost considerably and increased training hours with some months peaking to 1000 hours! He implemented a reward and recognition strategy and made sure all credit kept flowing on to the people doing the work and delivering the improvements.