DevOps Transformation with CICD Pipeline for a Portfolio Management Team

Client: Leading Financial Organization
Operating in more than 100 markets around the world, this client is one of the world’s largest providers of investment management services.

The Challenge:

This large, global financial organization was facing critical challenges in supporting its portfolio management team. With IT problems that included inconsistency and low-quality delivery, customers were extremely unhappy with the lack of effective services and solutions they were receiving. Delivery dates were regularly slipping and they were experiencing audit challenges, a lack of transparency, and a general inability to compete effectively in the marketplace.

The Solution:

The client needed to build out a Continuous Integration and Delivery Pipeline (CICD) so the Agile teams could improve their delivery flow, manage risk, and increase quality and productivity.

Eliassen Group designed the following approach that involved consulting, advisory, training, coaching, and talent support services, in addition to the implementation of best-in-class tools for each service:

  • Consulting: Recommending and then architecting the CICD Pipeline and tools.
  • Advisory: Oversight of CICD architecture build out.
  • Training: Onboarding the teams in the use of the CICD pipeline, and introduction of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD).
  • Coaching: Assisting the teams in learning ATDD, BDD and engineering best practices.

Eliassen Group relied on the DevOps Maturity Matrix, as well as the Technical Maturity Matrix, to measure the success of these actions against stated objectives on a monthly basis.

The Result:

Mistakes have been minimized with automation; there is no human touch involved in the build, and build time was reduced from 1.5 days to 15 minutes. Every team has a static code analysis as part of their Definition of Done, so each team checks in and the CICD system automatically runs the code through the static code analysis tool.

As a result, the teams now know immediately if they created a problem, and they can fix it before it gets merged back to the trunk. This has helped the teams de-risk from the start and saves them from having to fix bugs later in the cycle.