A shared services approach boosts capacity and clarity at a Fortune 100 financial services provider, bridging the gap between business stakeholders and development resources
Solution highlights
Client: Fortune 100 Financial Services Provider
Need: Build a systematic approach to define and document business-driven technology requirements and then move them quickly through the development cycle
Scope: A dedicated shared services team flexes to support a diverse and ever-changing portfolio of product development initiatives.
Program components
- Discovery
- User story development
- Prototyping
- Development support
- Market deployment
Results
- Built a dedicated and flexible resource team of Product Owner-delegates
- Supported on average 5-6 simultaneous initiatives in parallel
- Reduced development time and decreased cost associated with re-works with user-driven, well defined user stories
- Reduced time-to-market by contributing to highly efficient, product development cadence
- Maintained a full product backlog
- Applied Cadmus’ proven methodologies and best practices for user-centered agile development
The challenge
Digital transformation is a business imperative for financial institutions seeking to capture market share and engage customers with mobile-friendly, self-service retirement options. This Fortune 100 financial services provider is no exception, and their leaders made a successful business case to increase the technology investment to upgrade and modernize the portfolio. Even with funding secured, achieving digital transformation is easier said than done.
It was essential to communicate the business vision to the technology teams in order to prioritize and execute against the business strategy to achieve maximum capital return. Product owners knew intrinsically what features and functionality their customers wanted, but translating that knowledge into clear development roadmaps put a burden on stakeholders with full schedules and tight timelines.
The client needed a systematic approach to define and document requirements and then move them quickly through the development cycle. Cadmus stepped up with a flexible and practical solution.
The solution
This Fortune 100 financial services provider engaged Cadmus for a comprehensive shared services engagement. Cadmus established a dedicated support team to serve as advocates and advisors for business stakeholders. These PODs—Product Owner Delegates—act as business analysts and technical liaisons, serving as the business voice to technology teams.
Here’s how it works today: at any given time, five or six workstreams are ongoing, each with separate project or product owners from the business. These initiatives run the gamut from single-person, quick-hit tasks to multi-year efforts involving multiple large scrum teams. Cadmus’ resource team of 21 flexes to accommodate the changing demand and deadlines, with the ability to tap into development resources on demand for critical support areas.
“The shared services approach gives this client complete flexibility to pivot quickly to support critical workstreams, without the need for time-consuming scope of work changes,” says Chris Ford, EVP, Business Services. “Cadmus handles the big picture and the small details to ensure that the client’s business and tech teams work productively towards common goals.”
Cadmus analysts become an integrated part of the product teams, helping to bridge the gap between business priorities and development backlogs. Seamless coordination enabled teams to ramp up quickly and execute consistently, enhancing speed-to-market for high-impact initiatives. As always, user-centered agile development lies at the core of every successful product launch or enhancement in the shared services engagement.
Important business context
Large-scale initiatives involving multiple parallel projects, budgets, project plans, and resources must be continuously adjusted to accommodate shifting priorities and schedules. When Cadmus began the work, this Fortune 100 financial services provider was also undergoing a profound agile transformation. Taking the unique business landscape into account, Cadmus’ experienced agile leaders adopted change management best practices to reexamine and re-engineer processes accordingly. At the same time, Cadmus never lost sight of the client’s fiduciary oversight, compliance requirements, and risk mitigation efforts.
The approach
A typical workstream involves the following elements:
The Cadmus team has a strong track record navigating the matrixed structures and operational complexities common to large enterprises. Throughout this engagement, Cadmus’ product owner delegates have added value to each workstream by applying the company’s proven methodologies and best practices for user-centered agile development. Always a driving force in keeping the development team backlogs’ organized and prioritized, Cadmus created user stories on behalf of the product owners. In other words, Cadmus takes the burden off business stakeholders by packaging up user needs into actual requirements that the IT team can consume and complete.
- Vision: Aligning team goals to leadership strategy
- Discovery: Taking a deep dive to extract the product owners’ preferences and priorities
- User story creation: Creating specific use cases that reflect explicit and implicit end-user needs
- Prototyping: Accelerating the development cycle with detailed design specifications and visualizations
- Development: On-demand advisory and hands-on support to execute the backlog
- Market deployment: Assisting in developing QA protocols, training programs, and user guides
The shared services engagement has evolved to a place of strong mutual trust, with Cadmus initiating tasks and recommendations alongside client leaders. This Fortune 100 financial services provider and Cadmus are united by a shared commitment to improve engagement with plan sponsors, participants, and internal sales channels.
Representative workstreams
Highlights from three specific projects exemplify the range of workstreams and illustrate the underlying principle of using technology to replace and reduce manual tasks. An intuitive user interface is just one piece of the puzzle, albeit an obvious one. Streamlined processes that eliminate redundancies and strip out costs reinforce the value of Cadmus’ deep experience. Each of these projects launched successfully to enthusiastic and engaged audiences.
Portal development effort
This discovery-heavy initiative evolved into a national rollout of a comprehensive new proposal platform for more than 15,000 financial advisors. The project’s scope was wide-ranging and nuanced, taking into account diverse pre-sales, sales, and approval processes to build a real-time proposal development engine. From pipeline development to electronic signature processing, the Portal Development Platform modeled the benefits of Cadmus’ user-centered design approach.
Client analytics
To support an enterprise conversion to a modernized reporting platform, Cadmus created user stories for report conversion bringing a modernized approach to the user experience and recommended a phased approach to unlock additional efficiencies through further discovery and development.
Transactional data management
Third-party plan sponsors were using an outdated, macro-ridden Excel file to upload 401(k) rewards data into client systems. While still taking advantage of a familiar Excel-based interface, the revamped approach simplified and streamlined user processes. In-process visuals and guidelines improved the speed and accuracy of uploads, benefiting both parties.
A compounding value proposition
With the flexible shared services approach, this Fortune 100 financial services provider has introduced more collaboration and clarity into its operations. As a “translator” between business stakeholders and technology practitioners, Cadmus reduces friction and boosts mutual understanding. Perhaps most importantly, Cadmus helps ensure product owners get what they want right out of the gates. As a result, the client has recognized the value of engaging Cadmus early in the development cycle to capitalize on methodical discovery and integrated advisory.
