Challenge

A global investment bank ran several systems to record its position in multiple asset classes, calculating and reporting its status at the end of the day in the local jurisdiction.

But in the wake of the financial crisis and in anticipation of new banking regulations, the bank needed a system to consolidate and track all financial assets in a single place.

This Bank Inventory Management System needed to provide an accurate statement of the bank’s position at any point in time – either historically or in real-time. It also needed to gather asset transactions from several upstream systems. An aggregated position would be calculated and recorded in real-time, and then the system would provide this position and the related transactions to supporting downstream systems.

An in-house team had already started developing the product at the bank using Agile techniques. However, as the team was inexperienced with Agile, they failed to apply suitable rigor to the process, resulting in them failing to meet project milestones and deliveries.

Solution

With the project at risk, BJSS was engaged to recover the engagement and provide the client’s team with training in practical Agile delivery.

The BJSS team used the BJSS Enterprise Agile® approach to get the failing project back on track. The team developed a fit-for-purpose architecture to replace the ad-hoc design that had evolved as the previous team wrote its code. BJSS introduced practical measures too. Additionally, the team prioritized User Stories on a risk-first basis, set up a Continuous Integration environment, and built an automated test framework.

Daily team Stand-ups were held, while Sprints were planned around defined deliveries. The BJSS team worked closely with the upstream and downstream development teams and their users to ensure that the project, which was implemented in Java and based on a Microservices architecture, met their expectations.

Benefits

While the initial in-house project was failing, leading to a loss of confidence in Agile delivery methods, the project quickly turned around. It benefitted from the introduction of the BJSS Enterprise Agile approach.

BJSS ultimately delivered the Bank Inventory Management System on time, and it is now considered a cornerstone of the client’s systems. Additionally, with the techniques they learned using BJSS Enterprise Agile, the client’s in-house development team now understands how to scale and apply Agile in large multi-team environments.