Strengthening Client Satisfaction Through Agile and DevOps Capabilities
In the ever-evolving global financial landscape, a Multilateral Development Bank found itself facing a critical challenge—scaling its operations and value delivery to meet the rapidly changing needs of its clients. The Bank needed to transform its operations platform to fulfill its mission of promoting sustainable growth in their clients’ areas of operation. Recognizing the need for change, they engaged Excella for help. Through a series of Agile and DevOps discovery sessions, the team delved into the Bank’s pain points to determine root causes, unearthing ineffective ways of working and outdated technology that had been hampering progress.
Transformative Results with DevOps
With Excella on board, the Bank adopted Agile principles and DevOps capabilities and quickly saw improvements in their code and the way they worked. These principles and capabilities, underpinned by data from Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program, helped the Bank evolve their services steadily alongside the needs of their clients.
Customer Feedback
Armed with this information from early discovery sessions, Excella recommended solutions built around DORA’s DevOps process capabilities, to drive effective software delivery and organizational performance. We helped the Bank foster a more collaborative, iterative, and incremental approach to modern software delivery, that prioritizes obtaining and acting on customer feedback, early and often. By incorporating this concept, the Bank was better able to ensure that features and functionality being delivered aligned with customer needs and supported desired business outcomes.
Small Batches
We optimized product teams, promoting working in small batches to quickly incorporate customer feedback and continuously deploy small, incremental updates. By reducing the amount of work per cycle, the teams were able to quickly validate hypotheses and course correct where necessary. As the teams got better at breaking the work down to the appropriate size and learning from the small, incremental releases, their motivation and effectiveness increased, commensurately.
Team Experimentation
While the members of the product teams continued to gain confidence, we introduced and provided coaching on team experimentation. Leveraging feedback received from a previous iteration, members of the teams began building and testing lean prototypes, continuing to mature the product through refined stories and specifications. With the improved ways of working we introduced, the Multilateral Development Bank not only addressed their challenges but also gained the ability to deliver on their mission with renewed vigor and effectiveness.
Outcomes
Integrating Agile principles and DevOps capabilities not only empowered the Bank to achieve lasting transformative outcomes but also enabled them to enhance responsiveness to client needs. By incorporating customer feedback early and often, deploying tech updates in small batches, and giving the development team runway to experiment, the Bank has significantly decreased the amount of time it takes to push out features valuable and intuitive to their clients. As a result, these changes to user experience strengthened satisfaction and trust among the Bank’s clients while streamlining the road to meeting their mission goals.