Finance Co. is a financial services organisation providing products, advice and services across four continents. It services some 15 million customers via an extensive network of branches and ATMs and has over 40,000 employees. Finance Co. is a full service banking provider with services including credit and access card facilities, leasing, housing and general finance, international banking, investment banking, wealth management, funds management, life insurance, and custodian, trustee and nominee services.
Finance Co.’s substantial enterprise and solution architecture practice was charged with achieving measurable productivity improvements. Within the practice, the majority of effort and cost was expended in solution architecture and business analysis. Optimisation of these capabilities would realise a substantial productivity improvement.
Enterprise Architects assisted Finance Co. to improve architecture practice efficiency and effectiveness across its substantial team of solution architects. EA analysed existing practices, identifying over 200 symptoms for investigation. These were distilled into a roadmap for practice improvement addressing:
- Estimation practices.
- Architecture methodology.
- Content management.
- Knowledge management.
- Skills and on-boarding.
- Requirements management.
- Enterprise context for solutions.
In addition to general practice improvements the roadmap also addressed actions to improve:
- Business stakeholder (customer) satisfaction.
- Architect (employee) satisfaction.
In implementing the roadmap, Finance Co. achieved tangible efficiency improvement in the delivery of solution architecture for programs and projects, established consistency of architecture outputs and an uplift and architecture and design effectiveness.