Our client is a leading global investment banking, securities, and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments, and individuals.

The Challenge

The client was undergoing a multi-year project to upgrade and re-architect the core platforms used to support Internal Audit (IA). The IA team had already spent significant cycles on needs analysis, requirements gathering, portfolio and solution review, and program planning. The project was strategic to the business and required a high level of technical and business expertise. Normally the client would handle this work internally, but time and resource constraints led them to find a trusted and strategic partner to execute on discrete blocks of project work in support of the wider program.

The client was challenged by its use of unsupported proprietary software and legacy platforms, as well as a brittle technology architecture. This outdated infrastructure increased support costs and hindered the ability to deliver enhancements, along with delaying the allocation of limited engineering resources to work on strategic solutions.

A new service was proposed to replace existing project planning and staffing applications, integrate coverage and affirmation functionality, and to integrate with risk taxonomy, staffing intelligence, and audit execution software to drive the planning and execution of audit projects.

BJSS was chosen to deliver this critical service due to its strong partnership with IA and its demonstrated capabilities and delivery experience.

The Solution

With an aggressive timeline for delivery, BJSS rapidly developed a working MVP in four months with project creation and management functionality, and as a result was given additional work to integrate additional modules into the new service, including project staffing, entitlements, and project plan changes.

BJSS led a phased delivery of the additional modules, slowly transitioning IA from legacy applications by first ingesting pilot projects from legacy software designated for the new execution platform, and later supporting the direct creation of native projects. As a result, IA staff were able to be trained on the new application while still supporting the legacy software during a transition period.

BJSS deployed the service onto private cloud-based infrastructure, able to be maintained and supported by existing IA engineering staff. BJSS collaborated with IA engineering to ensure platform stability and availability with no service interruptions.

The new service serves as the principal application used by auditors to create and manage projects and acts as a central point of integration for several other systems, including the legacy plan management service, staffing intelligence, reference data hub, regulatory obligations database, ElasticSearch service, RabbitMQ data bus, risk taxonomy service, coverage and affirmation service, and audit execution platform.

The Outcomes

BJSS was able to deliver a performant, responsive, full-featured project planning application used by auditors across the world and designed to handle hundreds of audit projects per year. The new platform added automated processes that reduced reliance on auxiliary tactical processes to ensure complete and accurate information is used for management reporting purposes.

The BJSS-led development team achieved all OKRs with healthy (green) status over a development period of 18 months.

BJSS was able to introduce new ways of working and tooling to IA engineering, such as Liquibase, Cucumber framework, Zustand, and K6 performance testing, demonstrating their value through results, and these tools were subsequently adopted by other teams and rolled out across IA engineering.

As the IA engineering team expanded, BJSS successfully onboarded IA staff and handed over development tasks while continuing to lead the development effort. BJSS led training sessions on new technologies and design patterns that supported the successful delivery. These were then incorporated by IA engineering teams into other microservices. The application has been referred to as the “gold standard” for quality by IA’s own staff.