SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR:
Predict and Bridge the Gaps in the Software Development Process

Industry: Finance
Service: Consulting
Location: Canada

Situation

A Canadian Financial Technology firm develops and supports a financial software platform with approximately 2000 employees. Canadian Financial Technology firm develops and supports a financial software platform with approximately 2000 employees. Over the last 3 years, the organization experienced exponential growth, although their internal processes did not mature at the same rate. Despite its many successes, the company faced an exponential growth of technical debt in Q3 2019, this resulted in an impact on customer satisfaction, meeting their strategic goals and as well as an exponential growth of IT-related workload on company executives.

Although executives noticed symptoms, they were unaware of the root cause; they illustrated symptoms, including directing a higher number of executives and management hours in areas such as product delivery and support management. When an assessment of the Software Delivery Lifecycle process and Support Management processes were undertaken, it was identified that customer support requests were increasing exponentially as a result of:

  • Engineering delivering hundreds of new platform functions, innovative features, as outlined in their roadmap, unaware of their delivery processes limitations in the product documentation workflow, quality assurance, and the overall lifecycle which exacerbated the issue.
  • Product managers were over-occupied with their existing routines. They also lacked the tools to be strategic to predict and visualize process maturity.

As a result of the lack of process visibility, the company was unable to predict and course correct the inevitable slow-down in delivery, increase in risk, and their inability to complete successful deliveries in time.

Action

The goal was to enable and empower the Financial organization management with the visibility and insight to adjust and construct an optimized strategy. The objective in achieving this goal was to uncover the root cause of the issues, which was later identified as critical process gaps, and misalignment of Engineering results to business objectives. With the implementation of the SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR, it:

  • Provided a snapshot, illustrating current process maturity by collecting historical data from over 4 data sources and 1000s of data points, allowing management to visualize their “REAL” situation.
  • The company’s new actual performance was benchmarked against over 300 deliveries and 1000s of sprints with measured KPIs, illustrating their maturity positioning.
  • Through its cognitive analysis process, the ADVISOR helps build a strategy assisting in optimizing the SDLC process, elevating its maturity. The holistic strategy focused on productivity growth as well as resource allocation and usage. It clearly highlighted sub-processes requiring immediate attention in order to extract a suitable explicit model for the organization (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
Data from the SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR snapshot illustrates the trend in bug minimization on the platform.

Result

Exhibit 1
Data from the SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR snapshot illustrates the trend in bug minimization on the platform.

SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR through its online dashboard segmented by company role and its monthly consulting advisory by highly skilled discipline specialists provided the organization with the platform in which to formulate a viable strategy. Further, the firm was able to capitalize on SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR extended change management services as they were unable to course-correct quick enough to avoid a repeat in Q4.

As a result, the state of the SDLC process was improved. It entailed the rise in code quality, which reduced the number of bugs as well as support requests by 4 times. Furthermore, the number of features released per sprint increased by 3 times, which provided the company with a competitive advantage on the market. Further, executives spent 3 times fewer hours on overseeing and process management while gaining additional time to analyze strategic assignments rather than dwell on operational routine. (Exhibit 2).

Tools we used

SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR is a cognitive analysis system, collecting 1000s of data points from a multitude of sources. A range of the data sources amalgamated includes the SDLC process, interviews with stakeholders and operations, to version control data points. SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR is a necessary tool for the technology-focused company increasing visibility of process gaps, alerting when productivity degradation occurs, and the necessity for change management.

SOFTHOUSE ADVISOR is a tool providing a competitive edge for companies that need to survive and prosper.

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