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IBM and Nationwide 2020 Yearbook Flipbook PDF
IBM and Nationwide 2020 Yearbook
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ISSUE 02 YEARBOOK 2020
IBM AND NATIONWIDE INSIDE THIS YEAR'S 2020 EDITION
WELCOME Explore how IBM & Nationwide tackle new challenges and thrive during an unprecedented year
CONTENTS
FEATURES 01 Meet The Team Who are the key players
02 Thank You Join us in saying goodbye to our SRO
03 Covid-19 Response Learn how we supported Nationwide in unprecendented circumstances
P36
04 Delivering Innovation See how we transformed our teams
P24
05 Squad News Find out what the squads have been up to
06 Client Visits Showcasing our work to Nationwide
P32
07 Think Summit Showcasing our work to Nationwide
08 In the news See how Nationwide & IBM have featured in the news this year
09 Net Promoter Scores Our Client Feedback for 2020
10 Celebrating our people And how we kept sane during lockdown!
There is no doubt that 2020 has been an unprecedented and challenging year. Yet the work we have achieved together, in spite of these challenges, has only strengthened IBM and Nationwide's relationship and added to our great history together. As we move forward into 2021 it is clear that this will continue to bring further challenges but with that, great opportunities to make a difference for the greater good. I look forward to strengthening those relationships further but most importantly, to continue working alongside one another to delivery value to Nationwide's Members.
John Granger,
SVP, IBM PEP Executive for Nationwide
THE EDITORIAL It is my greatest pleasure to welcome you to the 2020 IBM and Nationwide Building Society Yearbook. I think it's safe to say that 2020 has been a year like no other. In March, the whole of the UK and India went into lockdown and the majority of us had to transition to working remotely. Yet despite this and all the challenges thrown at us, we have continued to deliver change and innovation at speed, demonstrate our resilience as a team and build upon those crucial relationships.
Hamsa Seshan Vice President - Senior Client Partner Global Business Services
Throughout the year we have rolled out the Da Vinci training programme across four squads, our Unicorns in SI are trailing bringing App Support into the sprints and the Test Engineering team increased their automation levels from zero to 79% (with 13% left to automate) and reduced the cost per test executed by 79%, from £110 to £23. We also supported the SI Squad by provisioning an IBM Cloud environment, working together to explore and document the architectural patterns and engineering playbooks related to Service Mesh. All the while delivering many successful implementations ensuring continued service for Nationwide's members. This yearbook is a source of immense pride and your unquestioned commitment personally energises me every day. I can't wait to see what we achieve next year! So, what are you waiting for? Have a flick through the pages and enjoy reading about all that we've accomplished together in 2020.
01
Nationwide's Leadership Team
IBM @Nationwide Meet Our Senior Leadership Team
02 Steve Briggs Our Senior Relationship Officer
Steve has been our SRO for many years now and we incredibly thankful for the way he has represented, guided helped us during this time. Transforming the way we work pushing technology and innovation forward as a Society, IBM at the heart.
are and and with
We've delivered countless releases and created many wonderful memories over the years and we look forward to more of the same whilst you're in your new role. I think we're due another criket game when things return to normal - winner takes all!
03
COVID-19, THE YEAR 2020 WAS DEFINED BY
Nationwide IBM
OUR RESPONSE
As Governments across the globe encouraged companies to work from home in order to the limit spread of Covid-19, it left the Nationwide account faced with a new challenge and the need to urgently create a business continuity plan in order for us to continue delivering to our client. Six weeks after lockdown was imposed we had moved from a ‘response’ position to a ‘BAU’ position. Across each area we mobilised at speed, changed direction, responded to urgent requirements and supported both the client and our people throughout. This was no easy feat and so it's time to reflect and see what we have achieved together. The next few pages are just a few examples of where we have supported and responded to Nationwide’s urgent requirements.
Bank of England Base Rate Change
SOLUTION PAIN POINT Since the Bank of England base rate changed (to 0.1%), and with a risk of a further reduction to 0%, the concern was that these rate changes would create issues in mortgage processing. Nationwide had to take steps to avoid member mortgages being processed incorrectly, where fees, interest rates and penalties could have been incurred, and impacted members at a very uncertain time in their lives. It could cause long term ramifications for them, but also cause long-lasting damage to the Society’s reputation.
Integrated testing was quickly drawn up between different parts of the Test team, focussing on key business processes in order to prove BAU functionality on the base rate change as well as on contingency changes. We were able to complete those by drawing on the existing automation framework, meeting the challenging deadlines. The test execution reports and analysis completed by the IBM Test Team formed the basis of the report sent to business stakeholders, providing the confidence Nationwide needed to continue to process and manage the mortgage book – even if the base rate is decreased further.
SE C URING M E S SAG I N G F O R T H E I N T ERNET B A N K Due to Coronavirus the Society anticipated a high demand for a secure messaging feature in the Internet Bank. And, in order to meet this demand and answer customer queries, we needed to increase the number of agents in an important Moxie application. A delay in responding would result in a disruption for addressing customer queries. This in-turn would result not only in dissatisfied customers but also impact the Society's brand as customers are unable to access branches and online banking channels which are more important than ever.
SOLUTION During this difficult period, the Digital Application support team lead, by Hitesh Parmar, worked to overcome all the necessary dependencies at a very short notice. Within a day, the team
implemented multiple license
updates in the Moxie application, which in turn allowed more agents to use the app in order to respond to customer queries - of which there were many!
OUTCOME In this unprecedented time, this helped increased the number of agents by circa 47% for the next three months to manage business criticality and surge in demand.
Thank you for all the work you did to get the additional Moxie Licenses implemented. without your support in managing this change it would have taken much longer to implement. Having these licenses has meant we can better support our members and ensures business critical processes carry on.
Authenticated Web Chat delivery
PAIN POINT Before lockdown started, members were not able to discuss personal account information over the web chat because of authentication issues. If members wanted to discuss topics including personal account information, they had to phone Nationwide's call centres or visit a branch. When lockdown began, Nationwide saw a huge increase in their volume of calls to their call centres and some branches closed whilst other had substantially shorter opening hours. It became more difficult to support all members, including all vulnerable members, when they needed it the most and Nationwide was at risk of not providing good support to their members.
SOLUTION Nationwide needed to offer a webchat functionality via the Mobile App to its members which would allow them to discuss their account information via the chat instead of relying on calls. And, in order to protect the Society's reputation and increased demand, release timelines were tight! The IBM team automated modelled test cases using SOAP UI and Selenium which allowed 665 combinations of member queries to be tested successfully and the end product was delivered to live within six weeks. The SI Squad also agreed to a change that wasn’t in scope and one they wouldn’t usually agree with since it breached all other Path to Live timelines. This resulted in the Authenticated Web Chat solution taking the latest release slot due to the urgency which in turn relieved pressure on other channels and allowed the members to feel more connected and supported.
I just wanted to drop you a short note to congratulate you all on a truly epic performance in delivering the IB Webchat. Despite some issues, we have managed to get our first COVID Release over the line, exactly when we said we would. A truly amazing effort and thank you all for hard work and perseverance, made even more remarkable given the circumstances. Thanks again and well done!
APPROACH
CONTACTLESS LIMIT CHARGE INCREASE A massive thank you for all your fantastic work over the last two weeks on
the
support
package
we
are
Although this seemed like a minor configuration change, the risk to the Society and its members was high and so exhaustive testing was performed by our IBM team to ensure the limit change did not impact other forms of contactless transactions such as Transport for London charges or parking fees that exceeded the £45 limit.
introducing for our overdraft borrowing members.
PAIN POINT In order to lmit the spread of Coronavirus within it's members, Nationwide wanted to increase the contactless transaction limit from £30 to £45 so members had the ability to spend more without the need to physically touch a pin machine.
Your
positivity,
can
do
attitude, problem solving and sheer quantity of effort committed to develop our solution in such a short period of time (especially considering the FCA curve balls thrown in for good measure) has been a joy to be part of. I’ve seen an
outpouring
of
positive
PRIDE
behaviours that really show how we come together to deliver the best possible outcomes for our members.
SOLUTION The Payments Spice Merchants team successfully completed the development and testing activities implementing the change into production within a week thereby allowing members to spend up to £45 without needing to touch a pin machine.
MORTGAGE PAYMENT HOLIDAYS Due to COVID-19, thousands of Nationwide’s members faced huge financial impact either from being furloughed or without income because their businesses had shutdown. Nationwide needed to act quickly to support their members and provide them with the option to sign up to the Mortgage Holiday scheme.
PAIN POINT
SOLUTION
If Nationwide didin't allow their members to take advantage of a mortgage holiday, it could have caused significant reputational damage and risked putting Nationwide's members in a difficult financial situation.
Our test team came up with an approach to automate the payment holiday functionality and reduce the load on the Ops team to rekey over 20,000 loans! The timelines were tight and once the automated solution was designed and built, the Test Team came in. Two teams worked together
Furthermore, Nationwide’s legacy systems in the loans space would not allow for such a thing to happen and instead a new loan would need to be manually rekeyed by the Operations team (which consisted of only 2 people) after the 3-month payment holiday period. Usually this happens at significantly lower volumes than seen in the current environment.
to complete the testing (all 3 phases of the Payment holiday work) within the agreed timelines and ensured the solution went live with no production defects. The solution remains live and is able to continue to process the requests daily, reducing the workload on the client team for now, and for the future. Since then, Nationwide has seen over 20,000 members take advantage of the scheme which enabled them to delay paying their mortgage for 3 months with no affect to their credit score.
04 TREASURE WILD DUCKS
2020 DELIVERING INNOVATION
A new horizon for accessbility testing! Automated Accessibility testing, reducing manual test effort. This increased test coverage in sprint enabling the completion of more accessibility testing.
Using Luhn to validate data Enabling us to take in one item or millions of items of data and validating this data against the algorithm. The tool confirms for each item whether it passes or fails and enables us to complete the testing of the migration within minutes rather than weeks.
Native Code Development offshore A pilot for Native development on a Mac Mini via EggPlant was demoed successfully leading to additional Mac-Minis getting approved and added to the Eggplant Servers. This would enable Native development to be done from Offshore at a lower cost!
WHAT WE DID
Bringing Integration testing forward Moved integration testing into sprint, removing sprints dedicated to completing SIT. This resulted in increased velocity and delivery of more work!
The DevOps initative of CICD: Fortify and Sonarqube are integrated as part of the automated pipeline which has resulted in reduction of 2 TQA resources. CICD pipeline has been enabled upto ST environment which is 40% of all env set up. This is saving on average 8 hours effort per sprint
Driving Innovation for testing PEGA Created a framework utilising an automation to build a CI/CD pipeline that would enable the team to be more efficient and ensure that testing effort was concentrated on critical areas.
CREATING
ENDURING ENGINEERS
CONTEXT
The IBM team of more than 500 people provides application development services for critical applications at Nationwide such as the Internet Bank, Mobile Banking app, Branch and Contact Centre applications. Like other financial service institutions Nationwide is facing significant cost challenges due to reduction in income and COVID-19 provisions. In parallel, Nationwide are pursuing a strategy of an increased in-house Engineering capability to have less reliance on partners. To support Nationwide’s challenges and protect IBM revenue, we initiated the Da Vinci programme
DA VINCI PROGRAMME
Two years ago, we completed a successful Agile Transformation which brought greater flexibility and agility for the society. However, within the teams, practitioners stuck to their core skillsets e.g. Designers doing design, developers doing dev etc. We used design thinking to ideate how we could improve the flow through the teams and reduce the cost of change. The solution was to create cross functional team members where individuals also execute tasks outside their core skillset e.g. a Developer doing Automation Testing.
CREATING ENDURING ENGINEERS
OUTCOME Output increased by 20% Teams became more resilient and engaged
HOW WE DID IT The ‘Da Vinci programme’ focused on cross skilling through a bespoke training course delivered in sprints. The test practitioners were cross skilled to pick up the design work while design and developers were trained in test design and automation. This enabled the individuals to become T-shape engineers. The training approach was a mix of self-paced learning, virtual classroom, hands-on tasks with an assigned mentor and instil some friendly competition! All achieved virtually during the lockdown, truly #inittogeather. The programme was a huge success. Nearly 100 IBMers were cross skilled and became T-Shaped Engineers.
IBM came second and was highly commended for the Arther Webb Partner Shield Award Received outstanding client feedback with several 10/10 NPS scores
Unicorn+
BENEFITS OF APP SUPPORTSQUAD INTEGRATION
CONTEXT
SI is pushing the boundaries on what can be achieved with the unicorn initiative and investment made within SI. SI paved the way to a new org structure and have broadened knowledge within Design, Build and Test and are now exploring other avenues. This is where Unicorn+ was born. Unicorn+ looks to build our Application Support capability within the SI cell teams enabling support to application maintenance, driving efficient and contact throughout the teams. The proposal outlined is currently being trialed in one of the nine cells in SI.
THE PROPOSAL
Responsible for App Support service offerings outside direct scope of Squad
FIXED APP SUPPORT TEAM TAKEN AWAY Lean, Dedicated, On-Call support (24x7) Triage all incidents and manage P1/P2 Pass eligible incidents/PR to the Unicorn+ team Optimal focus on issues due to upstream/downstream systems
FLEX TEAM WITHIN UNICORN TEAMS Address Code or Design issues in live for defined scope/ applications Incident & Problem Management, Change Management, Knowledge Management, CSI etc for defined scope
Strengthens development & support capability, leading to fewer live issues and/or a shorter time to fix. Fosters accountability and understanding of Live service in development teams. Maximize value with faster route to live for member impacting scenarios, as Live defects (for defined scope) are worked and prioritised by ONE TEAM against other features and Stories. Significant reduction in the Transition effort by avoiding operational overheads, as some of the existing process & governances (work packages etc) will not be required. Diversify opportunities within team and helps to retrain top talent.
Responsible for App Support service offerings outside direct scope of Squad
05 What have the squads been up to this year....
CHANNEL SQUAD Well, what a year. So much has happened, where do we begin? Let's start with a few highlights! Over 50 practitioners completed our Da Vinci training programme. Our full team was recognised and appreciated in Vikki's virtual away day. We saved £1.6m for Nationwide throughout 2020. The team received 81 badges or Certifications this year as they continue to build their skills. The Channel Squad were specifically callout for the Nationwide Arthur Partner Shield for our response to critical COVID deliveries. We have also seen over 70 successfully delivered major releases including: MLR, De-Duplication and Statement Printing. COA, COA E, I Forms using the agile method SAMM, COP, PAN Converter and Colleague on the Go Personal Loan Payment Holiday (COVID 19), Tactical I&E, Covid19 Dialler/ Collect data change and DMS Calculator During all of these deliveries we have maintained a continuous improvement culture, always focusing on what we can do better. We delivered at pace and maintained agility in deliveries and we are focused on maintaining this steady pace of our work for all upcoming sprints. Bring on 2021!
% IBM OFFSHORE 72
76 Sep-20
86
80 Oct-20
Dec-20
92 Mar-21
Jan-20
Avg day rate (£) for ibm in channel squad (incl vat) 333 Jan-20
Deliver Brilliantly
76 72 98% 1.6m
deployments so far this year - 82 by xmas hours to enable remote working in India Availability of team (Reduced Absenteeism) Savings for Nationwide throughout 2020
311 Sep-20
297 Oct-20
Continuous Improvement
23
Continuous improvements initiatives completed
56
Practitioners completed da Vinci programme
168 35
Test scripts were executed by non test Ideas generated post channel hackathon
270 Dec-20
247 Mar-21
Look after our people
all 52 81 05
Recognised in vikki's virtual away day Pride awards received by the team Number of badges/ certificates received Ibmers were promoted in 2020
EVERYDAY BANKING 2020 has been an extraordinary year. And so has also called for an extraordinary effort by our team. We came together and when the need arose, adapted to a remote working culture without impacting deliverables. Our IBMers have delivered over 11 successful releases, with our most notable milestones including: AppDynamics enablement for the Current Account journey providing the end to end app monitoring capability to unlock the CAO to be extended to a 24*7 operational mode. MongoDB migration – The IBM team developed some of the most complex modules of this, including Orchestration services. This migration ensured the backend system aligned with Nationwide’s strategy to use MongoDB atlas as the database system. It also unlocked some of the crucial features of the CAO journey such as data retention, document proof verification and regulation adherence. Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC) enablement for the Flex Direct, Flex account and FlexOne products and Double click tagging to advertise NBS products were achieved in quick time during the first lockdown Our test team created a test library for the CAO and CCO journey's which was shared across the new scrum teams. The teams are using tools such as Ready API and Postman to speed up SIT test execution which enables faster issue analysis and conditioning of the Test Data. Cross training resources resolved the dependency on having dedicated resources for each workstream and meant we could deploy SIT team practitioners across CAO & CCO. This approach resulted in a cost saving of circa £70K!
DIGITAL ORIGINATIONS TEAM Throughout 2020, Wildcats and Explorers provided great application services to deliver key outcomes across Current Accounts, Credit Cards and Savings Account Opening.
Our highlights from the year Delivered over 400 stories across Discovery & Account Opening Delivered more than 20 successful Deployments to production. Enabled a faster response to COVID-19 changes in the Discovery journey Customer error rate has dropped by over 5% on the application journey due to changes made to messaging and information on the journey to help customers Account Opening became the first platform to implement web messenger in an application. This gives the ability to capture qualitative and quantitative data providing rich insight to improve member's experience. Collaboration between Dev and Test to maximize productivity and optimum use of time by adopt a T-shaped engineering mindset.
Innovations & Improvements
Migrated from TFS to the GIT hub repository to enable better management of code and branches. Implemented DevOps in the Dev/ST environment reduceing configuration efforts by approx. 50-60%. Implemented the Fortify Tool to address security vulnerabilities in AO and Discovery. Our Build team is now contributing in ST and our Test team is working with build team on Unit Testing, this improved our productivity and utilisation of available capacity.
35+
Pride and Sprint champion awards received
Nominated for Arthur Webb Partner Shield for exceptional Agile Transformation Journey
SERVICE INTEGRATION SQUAD Successful implementation of a new agile Delivery team enabling high quality and quick delivery
Triple Firmware Upgrade
57 Nominations for Provision IBM cloud SI "Star of the month" env to assist with & Increase future roadmap regression 71 Pride Awards received exploration by IBM scripts by 33% (Istio)
Arthur Web Finalist
Adobe Sinch One Time Passcode solution under 7 working days.
1.7b
Number of production service hits to the NEM platform in billions
820
Number of SI components deployed in 2020
94 50
Number of production changes in 2020 Projects/phases delivered in 2020
Kick off of Speed Layer Convergence to form the future delivery platform
1.7m
Continuous Key Projects Delivered: Upskilling on SI - Money Laundering Regulation resources to meet - Every Day Banking with the SI Future - ODM Migration Roadmap - Open Banking
First ACE (containerized) service deployed to production
Number of targeted Performance Test stub hits
£5.4m
Unicorn+ - Building AppSupport capability within SI Delivery cells
CICD annual savings and EUDevop Award Nomination
290
Year to date Incident reduction for App Support
26%
Increase in offshore, now 84% of SI IBM team are offshore
21 108
Consecutive green RAG statuses from the client
37% 141
Reduction in costs per FTE compared with 2019
Number of components decommissioned
Number of badges and certifications awarded
DIGITAL PORTFOLIO 2020, a year of highs and lows. But lets focus on the highs and dive into see what the Digital Portfolio have achieved! The team; Moved to a fully remote workforce in India in 72 hours due to lockdown Saw record levels of productivity, a whopping >99%! Ran a reskilling programme that created new sprint capacity without increasing headcount Recieved consistent NPS Scores of 9s and 10s Came Second place in the Arthur Webb Partner Shield All the while making critical deliveries in support of the Society's members. We have laid strong foundations to build on in 2021 as we drive forwards towards more innovation, increased skills and better deliveries. A great partnership, a great team, great results.
33 42 83
Practitioners completed the da Vinci programme Pride awards received by the IBM team Sprint champions
>£1m 122
of Savings for Nationwide throughout 2020 Number of badges and certifications awarded
Here are just a few of our proudest key milestones from our teams: Banking App Start-up and login that aligned to the standard IDV&A approach to achieve compliance through 2 Factor Authentication (2FA), keeping members money accessible and safe Implementation of Risky Process which addressed 2FA mechanisms for Internet Bank and Banking for key customer journeys. Third Party Response which provides Internet Banking access to a donor's Power of Attorney. Cross Border regulatory change standardising national payments within the UK with EU/EEA-wide payments by making online credit transfers via NBS internet bank. We have continued to innovate, we have become the first team at NBS to move SIT into sprints through the implementation of IPT.
TEST ENGINEERING COE Well who would have believed this year would turn out the way it did. It certainly threw a bunch of challenges our way that kept us all on our toes... Across the CoE, we can be very proud of the year we’ve had. We’ve right sized the teams in line with more modern models and demand and reduced the cost of testing in all squads. And, we have laid strong foundations to build on in 2021 as we drive forwards towards increasing engineering based agility.
Forecasted Cost Savings for Nationwide by Squad from Test Driven Initiatives
79% £23 >£4m
65
of tests have now been automated Cost per test executed this year, reduced from £110 Savings through till March 2021 Continuous improvements initiatives completed
324
Pride awards received by the team
156
Number of badges/ certificates received
Our highlights from the year Payments - We transformed ourselves from being a functional test team to a test engineering team. - We learnt new skills and applied them in our day to day role. We learnt how to use UFT to automate the scripts for PPU/ projects and how to use SOAPUI for automating the scripts for Cross Border Regulations Projects. - We also automated BASE24 web services using SoapUI & integrated these with Jenkins to deliver a continuous testing approach for CICD pipeline. This change has enabled us to complete early testing, removing dependency on other squads and integrated environments, saving of lot of money in future releases.
Operations We end this year with some highlights which we are truly proud of; -Residual values associated with timesheet issues averaged 0.2% for the year - BAU files approved at original value with no £ corrections required ALL year - And we even had our Oct file approved without a single clarification required - Weekly Timesheet Dashboard averaging around 1.5% mismatches each week with 99% resolved within 3 days of being reported. - We also survived the transition to PPMO!
S&A
One of the biggest highlights would have to be moving to PEGA, which will replace a number of Nationwide's legacy applications. We have already delivered three releases this year together! - We responded to COVID-19 changes which required us to work over weekends whilst managing the BAU deliveries. - We also developed a robust Selenium Framework to automate the testing of PEGA releases. Improving the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of test. We were members of the team that won the R&A community 'Have a Go' award for our work within Pega, supporting delivery of 31 releases into production during this year with almost no production incidents!
Mortgages - We successfully delivered a test automation framework for MSO which enables us to run MSO smoke test automation script for Retail, NFI & Consumer each night after a deployment. - We built an auto framework for the SL Application OMS which reduced smoke testing to 20mins. - Reduced the testing required in UAT & the Hardening Sprint from 4 to 2 weeks by involving stakeholders in earlier sprints. - Doubled the amount of stories the team has been able to deliver. We reduced the team size yet increased the number of stories from 39 in Release 50 to 83 in Release 52!
CTS
We keep Members Data using synthetic data & masked data for testing, minimising access to members live data for testing and development. Environment Virtulisation helps to avoid use of data and real system still achieve test not possible to achieve in a test environment. - The Performance Testing team improved the performance of Modern Cloud applications and is helping legacy applications meet increasing demands. - The Operational Acceptance Testing team ensures the solution is fit for purpose in production and the required processes and procedures are in place to allow it to be maintained and supported in the live environment. - Application Security Testing helps to keep applications secure from attacks & hacking.
COP The team faced difficult regulatory deadlines, a frequently evolving solution and complex implementation to contend with. Not to mention issues with cloud environments integrating across multiple channels! But we successfully delivered testing for CoP Request 1 & 2. - We used the Robot Test Framework to convert a large set of manual scripts into an automated regression test pack.This enabled us to rapidly regression test changes, useful when supporting production incident fixes & environment updates. - Our journey to embrace an agile way of working for a complex integration project was nominated for a European Test Award in the Best Financial Project category.
RHS
Our focus for this year has been on increasing test automation and this has been delivered across all teams: - The CDC team enhanced the CIS Extraction tools, moving more manual testing to automated. This tool has been shared with other squads to help them increase automation with this reusable asset. - The SDC team has started to automate the PIQS application - The UHS team is creating a resuable universal automation framework that can be used across the whole RHS squad, this will enable us to accelorate automation across all components in the New Year - UHS, ODS and the Reconcilation projects have all successfully moved to agile, utilising productivity tools such as Confluence, JIRA and TM4J.
Group Functions
Security: We were proud to have been involved in the successful delivery of a number of 8 back to back releases including capabilities like AD Group Management, Native Changes, Dormancy and IIQ Upgrade. Risk: We supported over 60 deployments, providing integration testing of the account opening process to CIS, IMAS and NeRDE. Central Communities: We delivered the DAM Replacement project using following Agile which was our very first agile project in the squad and we were thrilled to deliver it without any defects or delay! D&A: We embraced agile for the delivery of Reconciliation and MMRPSD HDS, showing our ability to adapt to different ways of working and delivered regulatory changes
Awards Season In August, our Test teams on the Nationwide account sent a total of 12 nominations to the IBM Quality and Test Service which were reviewed and the top ones submitted to the European Software Testing and DevOps Industry Awards. The standard was extremely high and from these 12, seven of our nominations were put forward in both awards! And now, we are thrilled to announce that five have been short-listed and will be invited to the Awards Gala Dinner on the 26th and 27th January 2021!
Best Overall Project - Finance - COP A regulatory project that is absolutely critical to the way one of the UK's leading banking institutions operates its business. Minimising fraud by checking the name of the person the customer wishes to make a payment to.
DevOps Team of the Year - SIS The Service Integration DevOps Tasks Force (DTF) Team have successfully implemented a multibranch DevOps pipeline olution with circa £2.7 million cost saving and a cost avoidance of circa £5.8 million vs manual method.
Best Use of Technology in a Project Security Squad Implementation of a Selenium WebDriver Automation framework written in JAVA integrated with SailPoint customised APIs, BDD, TestNG, various property files/excels and databases to increase productivity, quality and accelerate the shift left movement.
Most Innovative Project - Mortgages How we brought performance testing into the DevOps pipeline on a daily basis
Best Agile Project - Digital Portfolio A transformation from waterfall to an agile testing team. Introducing new automation capabilities and evolving our manual test practitioners into quality engineering/ automation practitioners, while materially moving our organisation into a more agile mindset.
DevOps Team of the Year - Channels The journey of the Channel Squad adopting DevOps to bring increased speed to market and cost savings to the client with changes in communications and teamworking Best Use of Security in a DevOps Project Software testing teams want their code to be a secure, but how? If you combine test automaton with security testing tools to mimic unavailable systems, testing starts earlier — a “shift left” approach.
Shortlisted
APPLICATION SUPPORT It's been a busy year with huge amounts of change being processed and the teams have certainly been kept on their toes!
3400 30+ 56
Incidents responded to and resolved Maintenance changes (data and configuration updates) in production. Pride awards received by the IBM team
NEM: The team has continued to do a great job at monitoring the system's health after multiple change implementations and accurately report any issues observed along with the customer impact. The team also found a solution to pause regulatory alerts during a planned third party down time and process the alerts afterwards. The team coordinated the implementation of multiple config changes to improve the resilience of the system, especially in the areas where downtime may have had a regulatory impact.
Originations: the team developed an SSIS package for reports which tells users what access they have in the PLPOS systems. This in turn provides better control over who has access. The team also supported the tooling team to setup business analytics in AppDynamics for the PLPOS application. The new dashboard helps business stakeholders monitor the conversion rate through various stages of the loan application journey!
Mediated: Successfully congifurated changes to the Nearest Branch Finder. The team worked out a way to transfer online data between a third party and the Client systems which meant they no longer had to recieve the data on a CD through the post! The team also established a release plan for the quarterly maintenance releases for appointment manager that required seemless coordination with the vendor of the application, the test team, NPS and ECC.
Digial: The team did a fantastic job responding to many tequirements over the year. And, on top of responding to urgent COVID-19 requirements, the team's expertise also came in use when configuring Moxie changes to swap the old SMTP server details with a new one. This quickly helped our Client phase out all unsupported hardware related to the old SMTP server.
06 CLIENT VISITS
Our trips to India to meet the teams, understand the progress of our projects and learn about the continuous improvement and innovation the teams come up with are always exciting. And, in previous years, this topic would be bustling with content, detailing all the various visits that had taken place throughout the year. This year however, when the world came to a standstill in March, so did our Client visits to India. Though we did still manage to squeeze in a few trips before this happened! These trips are hugely engaging and eye-opening for us, as it enables us to witness first-hand the cultural learnings and how the teams are continually pushing to do more. The first client visit of 2020 saw Michelle Christmas visit the Test Engineering CoE team in Pune, Gurgaon and Bangalore. The trip went exceptionally well and seeing Michelle's engagement in all areas on what was a very tough travel schedule was incredibly rewarding. It was great to see how she was warmly welcomed in each location, like a returning friend and the presentations flowed so well.
INDIA IBM NATIONWIDE
Following Michelle's trip, David hosted Ian Craig and Vikki Williams who visited Pune and then Gurgaon looking at Channel and Change. The three visited the Automation centre which was a brilliant start since it drove the agenda and really brought out what they both were looking to see. One of the biggest highlights of the trip was seeing the efficiencies that test were bringing to the Channel team - Pranil Gadge's analogy of 'knowing what we have for breakfast' and 'sharing our breakfast' was brilliant as it showed the reduction in code deployment times and collaborative working across all areas of the squad. This was shortly followed by Hamsa hosting Ian Williams, showcasing IBM's SPA capabailities including IBM PoV at the SAP Banking Solutions and sevearl SAP case studies!
OUR FIRST VIRTUAL CLIENT VISIT TO INDIA
13 50+
4 1
fun and educational sessions available number of attendees across the 3 half days awards from Vikki Williams 10/10 NPS and fantastic Client feedback!
We may all be working remotely but that doesn't stop our ability to host virtual visits and The IBM Channel Squad did just that! Over the course of three mornings the Channel Squad ran an introductory All Hands, deep dives into each of the four teams and sessions on Test Automation progress and wrapping up of the Da Vinci Programme. The team also ran a virtual coffee break where everyone had to say what they are most proud of professionally and personally. Of course, we couldn't not run a fun session which included a very competitive round of Bingo! The visit was a huge success and a great insight for all attendees to learn what the teams have achieved in what's probably one of the toughest years yet.
07 At our recent Think Digital Summit UK & Ireland, we brought together the best and brightest technology leaders to help you beat the odds and brave the storm. We had a fantastic line-up of speakers, featuring some fascinating stories from our clients of all different shapes and sizes. We’re sure they will provide valuable insights into the art of the possible for both you and your organisation.
WHY THINK DIGITAL SUMMIT UKI? Discover how to transform your data to meet the demands of a hybrid, multi-cloud world; how to drive innovation within your organisation with a digital-first mentality; how industry-changing technology can help you act with agility, resilience and unity.
Emerging stronger to a different normal "Really interesting and valuable content"
THINK DIGITAL SUMMIT
THINK DIGITAL SUMMIT 2020
2020
08 08 IN THE NEWS.... THIS YEARS TOP HEADLINERS
NATIONWIDE AND IBM TRAIN VIRTUAL AGENT TO HELP PROVIDE TIMELY SUPPORT TO MEMBERS!
In July, Gary Delooze posted an article on LinkedIn where he talked about the work that Nationwide and IBM did together on migrating the infrastructure that supports their core banking platform to IBM's newest Z15 mainframes.
A huge well done to Laura Faulkner for becoming CIPS Procurement Leader of the Year - truly well deserved!
And to Nationwide Building Society for winning the CloudBees #DevOps Rising Star Award - fantastic recognition for what the team have acheived this year.
IBM RECOGNISED BY NATIONWIDE AS AN EXCELLENT PARTNER IBM were thrilled to be placed second overall and the only IT Service Partner for the Arthur Webb Partner Shield Award. What was even more pleasing than the highly commended position were the reasons why our IBM team were recognised. Firstly, we were the only Partner to achieve a volume of nominations, four in total across different areas of The Society. Across these nominations IBM were recognised for the innovative approach to delivery,
the skills of our people and the way that we delivered critical changes to the highest quality and at an unbelievable speed. All of this was underpinned by the recognition that the account team work in harmony with Nationwide and that we deliver a true Partnership. A big congratulations to BT for winning the award and to Idemia for coming third. Go Team Nationwide!
Meet the stakeholders we deliver to...
09 WHAT NATIONWIDE THINK OF US
NET PROMOTER SCORES
This year's NPS results further demonstrates our continuous efforts to listen and improve our partnership and we welcomed incredible client feedback for 2020! It was gratifying to see the Nationwide account recognised for its exceptional work, and the team should take pride in what we have achieved throughout the year. In attaining a higher and near-perfect scoring and feedback in the form of commentary across the board, IBM and Nationwide are on their way to achieving high excellence.
2019
2020
N P S
s e u g a e l l co e d i w n o i t r a u N o s e d b r i r o c W es d o t d e s have u service
...and the IBMers that lead it
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Celebrating our People
It’s important to celebrate our team’s successes because without them, our Service wouldn’t be what it is today. A huge thanks goes to the all the members and teams who helped make 2020 a year of success and achievement. Below are a selection of people who received a Pride award this year.
And how we kept sane during lockdown... Neha Mishra re-ignited her old hobby of drawing
This is how Andy Tyler spent his lockdown titled “what to do with an old trampoline?!”
SAM HOLLINGDALE AND HER HUSBAND LEE MADE HOMEMADE PASTA! Helen Gordon made pret chocolate cookies and chocolate buns!
Dave Boysontook his bike out for regular spins!
Would you believe that Ashwin Aina’s son, Aditya, trusted his dad to cut his hair
A selection of homemade delights from the Digital Test team better known as ‘Digital Master Chef Team’!
inspired by this year’s Great British Bake-Off, Neil Evan's wife made a smoked salmon and chive bread
we ran a fancy dress competition! David Bolton and his family made some new friends during their holiday to the Lakes
A bit of DIY including an outdoor kitchen and a volcano
And a baby pic competition!
We hoped you've enjoyed reading through what we've achieved together this year....