Leading Financial Services Company Improves Engineer Experience, Increases Visibility, Enables Agile Transformation

Creating seamless digital customer experiences is essential to sustaining success in the banking industry today. Innovation requires hiring the best engineers and utilizing them effectively and efficiently.

To achieve its strategic objective of servicing its customers anywhere, one of the largest financial services companies in the USA is undergoing a CTO-led global digital transformation. Its software delivery organization has adopted Agile development at scale and needed best-of-breed tooling to support specialization, maximize productivity, and provide leadership with the visibility needed to ensure innovation maintains top priority.

To maintain the integrity of its complex workstreams and automate cross-tool traceability for improved collaboration and regulatory compliance, the financial services provider engaged Planview®. Planview Hub, a leader in value stream management, provides the integration backbone for the organization’s entire product development ecosystem.

The company was experiencing growing pains as a result of a series of mergers and acquisitions that had contributed to unprecedented expansion for the company. Alongside the influx of new talent, the development organization had to contend with a multitude of new, specialized tools.

Leaders recognized the importance of allowing specialists to use their preferred tools to maintain efficiency and productivity. However, it was also becoming clear that maintaining parity between the two main systems (JIRA and ServiceNow) required extensive, time-consuming, manual effort – effort that could be better spent improving customer experiences.

Engineers and developers were spending hours each week copying and pasting information and importing and exporting records. Performing manual, administrative tasks to maintain the two unrelated systems was taking up valuable time that could otherwise have been spent on work driving business outcomes.

Generating reports across multiple tools was another challenge that required significant manual effort. The leader of the Agile Transformation Office within the organization expressed frustration with this inefficiency, saying: “We need to be able to leverage the talent we have more effectively and efficiently. We want more people building software and fewer people providing updates and creating PowerPoint presentations.”

The VP of Delivery further explained: “Ensuring data consistency across disparate applications had become a huge frustration for our technologists, ultimately undermining some of the advances we’d made with the shift to Agile.”

The inefficiencies within the toolchain also posed a significant risk to the business. Ensuring data traceability is vital to comply with regulatory requirements, especially in the financial services sector. Depending on manual processes to preserve and integrate data across systems becomes increasingly risky as operations scale up.

Finally, the lack of visibility into competing priorities between innovation-related work in Jira vs. operational-related work in ServiceNow was creating tension between technology and business leadership.

Technology leadership focused on finding a scalable solution to solve their core challenges.

“Our goal was to provide connectivity and traceability across critical solutions and to streamline workflows while maintaining governance and guardrails,” explained the VP of Delivery. The priority was to reduce team frustration by streamlining workflows across applications – without sacrificing governance.

With several thousand employees who directly interact with their technology tools, the organization sought a strategic integration backbone for its evolving toolchain that could also provide business intelligence insights.

The organization's need for a comprehensive, secure, and efficient solution led them to choose an off-the-shelf option over multiple individual integrations or plugins. To enhance collaboration, meet regulatory standards, and maintain the integrity of their complex work processes, they opted for Planview Hub. Collaborating closely with the Planview Hub team, they were able to ensure the desired business logic and seamless integration of different systems, ultimately boosting productivity and traceability.

By the end of the implementation period, the team was fully trained on the solution and confident they could independently utilize and administer it going forward.

With Planview Hub, the financial services provider is now able to better capitalize on their engineers’ time and talent. Gone are the days of manually copying and pasting data between tools. Now, maintaining data parity and traceability across the toolchain is something that happens automatically.

Integrating Jira with ServiceNow has improved the consistency and predictability of product delivery and allowed customer support and development teams to communicate and collaborate in real-time.

With everything in one place, leadership has more insight into risks and issues threatening delivery and can make more informed, insightful decisions regarding priority and capacity. “It has opened (business leadership’s) eyes to things they didn’t think to worry about. They have applications running in production that require care and feeding – that whole aspect of operation was something the business didn’t see or bother themselves with. Now, they’re starting to understand why some things get a late delivery date.” – Leader in the Agile Transformation Office

The team looks forward to continuing its partnership with Planview Hub. The VP of Delivery shares, “In my long experience with different vendors over the years, I am such a fan because of the level of support from the Planview team. That level of experience is top-notch. I feel very comfortable that it is a partnership and Planview is invested in helping us be successful.”

Implementing Planview Hub removed the barriers that were keeping the financial services provider from reaching its full potential with Agile. With Planview Hub, the organization can focus on doing what it does best: delivering exceptional customer experiences in consumer and commercial banking.