An Agile Journey UBank - UBank shares details about the success of its organisation, how having a start-up culture has allowed them to transform ...
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UBank
An Agile
Journey
BULLETPROOF SUCCESS STORY.
UBank shares details about the success of its
organisation, how having a start-up culture has
allowed them to transform their business, and
how Bulletproof is enabling its digital journey.
www.bulletproof.net
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
Who is UBank?
UBank is an award-winning
Australian digital bank,
established in 2008 by National
Australia Bank as an independent
attacker brand with a mandate to
disrupt the market.
Today, the business has more than As a digital only bank with no branches,
365,000 customers and about $15billion UBank benefits from having fewer costs
in managed funds. Operating with a start- than your typical financial institution and the
up mentality, UBank’s team of 200, from the flexibility to challenge the traditional banking
executive to the contact centre, are based and customer service model.
across two floors in North Sydney.
02
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
UBank is commited to...
At UBank the customer is at the heart of everything. The team is committed to exceeding
customer expectations by offering simpler, better, smarter banking.
To ensure customer demands are met and exceeded, UBank dedicates itself to initiatives that
focus on:
1. Customer empowerment 3. Innovation
2. Simplifying banking 4. Reliable and secure banking
Customer empowerment Simplifying banking
UBank delivers up-to-date and accurate information The UBank team prides itself on taking the complexity
to customers that is available 24/7. The bank offers out of banking and offering a very specific product
customers easy-to-use online tools and empowers set. The business model centres around supplying
them to make the best decisions for their personal customers with what they want, when they want it.
finance needs. UBank removes the unnecessary extras, dedicating
efforts to providing customers with services that are
easy to use and suited to customer demand.
This extends to the bank’s customer value proposition—
Just the Bank you Need.
Innovation Reliable and secure banking
To stay competitive in a saturated market, the UBank Customers want a reliable, robust and secure banking
team consistently reviews ways that they can innovate. service. This is front and centre of every technology
They implement solutions to help execute and turn and business decision at UBank.
ideas into reality.
03
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
A FinTech
with a banking licence
Essentially, UBank is a FinTech with a banking licence committed to continually improving its
services through the use of innovative technologies and best-practice methods. It is not afraid of
changing for the better.
During the past 12 months, the digital team has undergone restructure and transformed to
ensure they match business objectives and deliver customer focused outputs. To do so, UBank’s
digital product teams have been organised into three core cross-functional groups, each
dedicated to a fundamental stage in the customer journey – the public team, the origination team
and the internet banking team.
Every team within the digital group is empowered with the resources and team members needed
to build products for their specific customer phase. These cross-functional teams contain the
various skill sets required (design/UX, development, testing, business analysis, strategy) to
develop new features from concept through to launch.
04
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
UBank’s three cross-functional teams:
Public Product Team
Dedicated to prospective customers
The public team is responsible for ensuring a
consumers first experience with UBank (via their
website or the UBank UrHome Property app), is
as seamless and intuitive as possible. Providing
potential customers with utility through access
to the information they need in order to make
informed decisions.
Origination Product Team
Dedicated to applying customers
The origination team is responsible for optimising the
application funnel for all products, and ensuring this is
as pain free and uncomplicated for their customers as
possible.
Internet Banking Product Team
Dedicated to existing customers
Once a customer has signed up to UBank,
the internet banking team is responsible for
developing products that empower customers
to make financial decisions, self-serve and reach
personal financial goals.
Moving to cross-functional teams rather than traditional role-based teams can be a difficult
cultural shift. Successfully implementing this restructure relied on the support and commitment
from the entire digital team and wider business. Teams now sit together, go out for team lunches,
meet face-to-face multiple times a day and participate in team-building exercises. These
interactions have paved the way for the simpler, better, smarter customer engagement process
offered today.
05
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
It’s important to me that there are
no silos within the product teams
– whether you are a developer,
business analyst or tester, we want
everyone to speak up and be heard
and provide input into the products
we deliver to our customers.
We find that by listening to
everyone, there is more room
for innovation
- Jeremy Hubbard - Head of Digital, UBank
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
Key success drivers for
UBank’s Digital Team
It is clear UBank is committed to delivering an exceptional digital experience for its customers
through convenient and easy-to-use banking products. But what does it do to achieve this?
The bank dedicates itself to consistently delivering innovative initiatives by developing and
maturing the following five pillars:
Confidence in Transparency across Reducing release
release dates. the organisation. cycles.
UBank’s product teams Full transparency and visibility Reducing release cycles
wanted to have confidence in across the business would would enable product teams
predicting future release dates, enhance overall buy-in from to be adaptive, innovative and
so that they could set realistic the wider UBank business meet customer demands and
expectations with other team and provide understanding on expectations, more efficiently.
members, stakeholders and where teams were investing
c-level decision makers. their time and resources.
Prioritising for the Shared goals and context across product teams
best outcome. and the UBank business.
Possessing the ability to Having clear goals on what is expected from each team at each
easily prioritise and manage release is key to productivity and team motivation.
the product backlog would
empower the product teams In addition, having a deeper understanding into the context, why
to focus on delivering the right products are being built, and how they service the needs of both the
business outcomes and remove customers and the UBank business, provides a more developed sense
noisy distractions. purpose and ownership across the entire digital team.
07
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
We knew that we needed to adopt
an agile approach to our product
development process – either
through our in-house team or by
partnering with an external expert.
Working with Bulletproof allowed
us to leverage their expertise
and to receive impartial feedback
to help us move quickly and
efficiently.
Within weeks we’ve realised
our KPIs and the foundations that
shape the path for a
successful future.
- Ben Drayton - Product Owner, UBank
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
Project Overview.
Phase 1. Agile Coaching
Bulletproof was initially engaged by UBank to provide Agile coaching for
twelve weeks across UBank’s four product teams. UBank’s key goal was
to improve the speed and predictability of their team’s ability to deliver
new features to customers.
We want to improve speed
and predictability.
Previously, UBank delivered product features in six week iterations.
However, they wanted to release faster and get things to their customers more quickly. The
challenge was making this a reality.
UBank partnered with Bulletproof to use agile coaching to pinpoint how to halve that feature delivery
time. The three teams responsible for developing UBank’s customer-facing banking applications
and websites went through a process of agile coaching, designed to unlock further efficiencies in
the product delivery process.
09
Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
Starting UBank’s Agile Journey
How did Bulletproof enable UBank?
UBank embarked on a journey to becoming a truly agile FinTech organisation with Bulletproof as
their trusted partner. The Bulletproof team laid out a 12-week program for Phase 1 with the aim
of realising their key business objectives.
It was important for UBank and Bulletproof to set objectives and KPIs that were both ambitious
and achievable to obtain the business buy-in for future phases of the journey.
Workshop and DevOps/Agile Maturity Assessment (1-4 weeks)
1. The first step was conducting a DevOps/Agile Maturity Assessment, which
enabled UBank to highlight the areas of development that needed priority.
• Workshop, discuss and agree on key success drivers, KPIs and objectives.
• Evaluate current DevOps processes and highlight any gaps between desired and
current states.
• Bulletproof provides a series of recommendations specific to UBank.
Adopt, embed and improve (5-8 weeks)
2. Once the teams were in agreement with the plan moving forward, the next
step was for Bulletproof to assist with adopting and implementing the
recommendations.
• Bulletproof assigned a dedicated expert to help the UBank team adopt the
recommendations and new processes.
• Ensured processes are iterative and repeatable.
• Developed and enabled teams to use in-built review mechanisms, so they are
empowered with the tools to self-review and manage processes
Coach and Mentor (9-12 weeks)
3. Once a working model was in play, it was time for Bulletproof to take a step
back and ensure that UBank was enabled to take control.
• Bulletproof helped UBank identify Scrum Masters to take over.
• Coached individual Scrum Masters to drive success.
• Enabled the team to become self-organising and improve on agile principles.
• Identify areas for improvement and facilitate growth in these areas.
10Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
What was UBank able to
achieve in the first 10 weeks?
Phase 1 has now been completed and within the space of the first 10 weeks, UBank has realised
some significant changes throughout the process. In turn laying down the groundwork for bigger
and better things on the horizon.
UBank has experienced the following successes:
Gaining full transparency across UBank, gains buy-in on
Full
how features are going to be built and when they will be
pushed out to customers.
This builds on the confidence of key stakeholders within
Transparency UBank, empowers the four teams responsible and
enables clear forecasting and communication to rest of
the business.
Productivity
increased by
Developers increased the quantity of development work
from five to 10 days in any three week period. 200%
Delivery cycles Increased
reduced from 6 weeks to
Collaboration &
3 weeks Innovation
Delivery cycles reduced to three UBank’s cross-functional product
weeks: an enhanced agile culture has teams are now empowered with the
reduced delivery cycles from six weeks tools to work more effectively together,
down to just three weeks. increasing collaboration and innovation.
11Bulletproof Success Story - UBank - An Agile Journey
What’s next on the horizon
for UBank?
Achieving rapid wins has only increased UBank’s appetite
for further technology-led innovation. By using Agile and
DevOps approaches to software development, UBank’s key
digital and product stakeholders see the next goal as not
only delivering working software more frequently, but also
releasing it out to production on an as-needed basis.
Bulletproof and UBank are looking at enhancing
deployments into production, which involves further
strengthening collaboration across development and
operations teams and ensuring the right processes and
technologies are in place.
It all adds to UBank’s desire to meet customer needs in a
nimble and innovative fashion - getting the right information
to customers, quickly and consistently.
All of this work has helped UBank continue to deliver on
its vision of becoming Australia’s most referred brand
by allowing the business to meet customer needs in an
innovative and nimble fashion.
Through Agile coaching and our
work with Bulletproof, the whole
organisation has a much better
understanding of not only what we
are building, but also why we are
building it.
- Ben Drayton - Product Owner, UBankBulletproof Professional Services
DevOps & Agile Enablement
Bulletproof offers DevOps & Agile Enablement professional services to support you in delivering
applications and features earlier and often.
Our Agile Coaches and specialists will work with you at every stage of your journey, from initial
consulting and coaching, through to delivery and implementation, and continuous support and
improvement.
Contact us to see how Bulletproof can assist you in achieving your
DevOps & Agile strategy.
1.
DevOps & Agile
Assessment and
Strategic Roadmap
Best
Adopt 2.
Agile Development Practice
Practices
3. Refine Continuous
Integration with
Automated Testing
Embed Continuous 4.
Deployment and
DevOps Culture
About Bulletproof
Bulletproof (ASX:BPF) is the leading cloud services provider in Australia/New Zealand and trusted
partner to over 750 organisations.
Bulletproof simplifies complex technology and enables rapid transformation for businesses of all
sizes. Our certified and experienced Cloud experts advise and support organisations at every
step in their cloud journey, by providing market-leading expertise and mission-critical support
across multiple platforms and technologies.
T: AUS 1300 663 903 | NZ 0800 258 773
E: contactus@bulletproof.net W: www.bulletproof.net.auYou can also read
