DevOps Champions

Brickendon was engaged by a global bank to rollout DevOps across their organisation. Our specialists were able to successfully embed DevOps within the organisation globally, working directly with development teams, senior management, country heads and C-suite executives to increase the number of releases and decrease the number of incidents impacting the business. The team worked to secure a global team of the best resources available to help the client switch to smaller, faster and safer software
releases, which ultimately saved the bank significant amounts of time and money.

Client Challenges

The client had many challenges, these included:
Low levels of DevOps, automation and agile maturity in the organisation
Resistance to change within various divisions, asset class and management teams
Long release cycles preventing the bank from reacting quickly to market and industry
changes
Lack of accountability, with no one individual or team taking responsibility for the
whole process
Limited use of automation in the Cl/CD pipeline
Lack of communication and strategic vision between development and management
team.

Brickendon Solution

Brickendon brought in their own experienced DevOps specialists to guide the client through the process of switching to a DevOps way of working. This included:
Restructuring the organisation into pods or squads and focusing on promoting autonomous, multi-skilled
teams to take end-to-end control of the whole process from software development through execution and into production. This helped instil a sense of accountability amongst all team members
Working with the client’s internal teams to move away from the traditional waterfall software
development cycle and employ agile and lean methodologies. This enabled work to be prioritised as
appropriate, thereby reducing the time taken to complete tasks and encouraging the discovery of
problems earlier in the lifecycle, making them simpler, cheaper and less time-consuming to fix
Providing tooling and test automation specialists to showcase the benefits of increased automation, in
particular in relation to consistency in the environment build processes and integration of release
management with automated testing. Once adopted, this helped speed up the process and removed some of the risks associated with human intervention Encouraging the adoption of Kanban or Scrum to speed up the software development cycle. These methodologies allow workflow to be monitored and prioritised, taking into account both planned and unplanned activities. Unrelated tasks can be carried out alongside each other, reducing the waiting time and propelling the project forward
Creating a backlog of work whereby all team members agree on the priorities: sprint planning,
retrospective and demonstrations.

Encouraging alignment to a shift-left way of working, which means testing is carried out as early as
possible in the development process, reducing the risk for costly and time-consuming fixes late in the cycle. Organising roadshows and training sessions globally to up-skill teams and to showcase the benefits of the DevOps way of working, with the aim of changing the mindset within the firm and promoting accountability: you build it; you break it; you fix it.