About the company

A leading U.S.–based mortgage firm.

Challenge

The company relied on its core financial application, which was developed by a large internal team using a Big Bang process. The existing processes needed clearer visibility into features that teams were working on, and it was not easy to track progress. The current waterfall process and a lack of unified data made it challenging to finalize product development priorities.

The system was fragile, releases required heavy debugging and it took a long time to fix issues. Process inefficiencies resulted in missed deadlines and caused significant delays in delivering new features critical to the business. The total cost of ownership was rising, and the entire process and the team structure required an overhaul.

What we did

• Assessment, strategy and roadmap
• Modern agile implementation
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Minimum viable product (MVP) implementation
• Continuous delivery transformation
• Agile coaching

Solution

Unisys’ Cloud, Application & Infrastructure Solutions team conducted a 360-degree analysis of the existing processes and created an Agile delivery playbook to digitally transform the planning-operating-delivery model and a mindset shift for the team to provide a frictionless delivery experience to internal business customers. The Agile delivery process was implemented to help ensure better planning, predictability, lower risk, higher return on investment (ROI), increased confidence and faster delivery of application upgrades.

Process transformation

• Decompose the massive backlog to logical program increments
• Leverage data-driven insights for feature prioritization, dependency management and application improvements
• Plan and execute MVP
• Enable successful Agile ceremonies with right-size sprints

Delivery transformation

• Create and release end-user-ready features while building the product
• Iterate frequently and provide regular demos to stakeholders to quickly get feedback and incorporate it into builds
• Make sure that integrated and automated tests are included in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Create dashboards providing real-time metrics on the project status and delivery

Team transformation

• Create right-sized, distributed and highly efficient product teams
• Organize teams around product lines instead of a single large team building a monolithic application
• Ramp up full-time workforce on multiple vectors, including technology stack, process and delivery

Result and outcomes

With the implementation of an Agile delivery framework and full-stack engineering and CI/CD pipelines to automate testing and deployment, the company realized the following outcomes and benefits:

Business benefits

• Enhanced ROIs with smaller right-sized teams
• Reduced total cost of ownership
• Improved feedback loop and course corrections
• Reduced time to market
• Improved predictability