A leading financial services corporation leverages a DevOps approach to improve and standardize its teamwork practices resulting in a cost avoidance of $8.5 million.
SITUATION
Due to our longstanding partnership, our client partnered with Apex to initiate their digital transformation in the Application Operations portfolio. They were impressed with our deep experience in a variety of disciplines and few agencies could support a true digital transformation which includes people, process development, and tools. During the assessment phase, we identified several key issues. The most prominent was that delivery teams lacked cohesion and had unpredictable outcomes with heavy reliance on others for improvements and decision-making. Additionally, there were strained relationships across the organization, a desire to move to a digital model, and quality delivery gaps. This portfolio vision was to automate system support and move to an enterprise DevOps approach.
Reduced overhead costs by 20% through automation
We deployed an Apex coach to instruct and oversee four client coaches supporting over 100 client employees. They managed incidents that arose during the transition period by creating workarounds and manual patches. Our team improved the client teamwork practices over the entire operating area while improving and standardizing their processes and practices. The client teams achieved economies of scale and were positioned to automate their work for efficiency. We coached the teams through scrum, workflow, and quality delivery practices. Once they were working as a unit, they were able to take in work, swarm, pair, and cross-skill using a FAST Agile approach. This enabled the Lean Six Sigma team to follow up with an automation project. Through their work, they improved leadership cohesion, streamlined process management, identified waste, automated systems, and set up a self-improvement cadence for the client.
RESULTS
Our teams were able to provide the client with a cost avoidance of $8.5 million in people, process improvement, and automation. Their automation reduced overhead costs by 20% with ongoing work continuing, creating economies of scale as they transition to a DevOps model. Additionally, they reduced coaching costs by 100% by creating a learning organization that can conduct root cause analysis to identify and implement improvements.
