- Client: National Australia Bank
- Date: 2008 - 2010
The bank needed a flexible, web-delivered application to help its institutional banking staff structure and estimate returns on large and complex transactions.
Stephan started as Senior Developer on the project and soon was asked for the Technical Project Lead. He gave direction to a team of 5 people on a high profile project. The project was delivered above expectation, on time and on budget.
Because Pricing Centre was the first to go live GLOBALLY with Silverlight RTM, Microsoft was keen to write a whitepaper about the success. This can be downloaded in the Sharing page.
More achievementsThe 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 build 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 build 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.
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 exceptional 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 ran 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.
The success of the project even reached Microsoft's attention as they offered to write a case study about the project. Please see the Sharing section or on Microsoft Case Studies to view it.
"Stephan joined our development team from the Netherlands and immediately made a positive impact and valuable contribution to the team developing a new Web based Pricing and Return Measurement application for the NAB. He grew to become the Lead Developer and displayed diligence, experience and commitment in ensuring the team reached its objectives of delivering an extremely well received quality product for the User Group. An integral compnent of the Projects success, Stephan was easy to engage with to the point that the Business SME's felt comfortable in working directly with him to ensure alignment of understanding. The application has also recieved external visibility being utilised by Microsoft as a Test Case for their Silverlight Application. I would highly recommend Stephan for application development and team leading activities."
Phillip Gadzinski, Senior Agile Project Manager