Project rescue for a banking business

Customer

Our customer is one of the largest full-service financial corporations offering retail, corporate and institutional clients a wide range of banking, investment, pension plan and life insurance solutions. In the last few years, the company's banking business has grown considerably, having consolidated a number of federal and regional-level banks.

These structural changes made the business evolve at all levels, including online promotion and remote client servicing. Realizing the strategic importance of the core website for sales driving and brand promotion, the customer decided to enhance and modernize it with regard to the actual market needs.

The local contractor responsible for the solution development failed to meet the customer’s quality and performance requirements, so they started looking for another software vendor to speed up the product release and meet the deadline set by the business plan. They entrusted the project to Itransition, relying on our rich expertise in web portal development proved by years of experience and solid track record.

Process

Technology

The solution is an RoR-based application, developed with the use of time-tested web development practices. Appealing UI was implemented using Jquery, Angular and Ajax technologies, while business logic rests on Ruby on Rails. For the database layer we applied powerful PostgreSQL database system.

The application was integrated with the Yandex.Maps web service and a custom mobile application, which enables seamless information exchange between them.

From Software Vendor to Trusted Partner

The project developed by the previous contractor was not ready for release. Because of the poor source code and complicated system architecture, the solution was low-performance and difficult to maintain and change. 

Itransition allocated a team of experienced business-analysts to investigate the context. Having examined the source code and business requirements, they prepared detailed documentation and jumpstarted the project in 2 days.

The project goal was to improve the source code quality, implement additional features and make the system easily scalable and modifiable. After the product’s rollout, the Customer planned to enhance the website continually, making it more appealing and interactive.

In this regard, we distributed the project scope between 2 teams.

Itransition’s Contribution

Development Team 9 Software Engineers	Support Team L1: 10 Customer Support Specialists L2, L3: 3 CS Specialists
Business analysis	Project environment monitoring
Source code review on compliance with RoR guidelines	Website availability monitoring
Development processes reengineering, from nonsystemic operations to wellorganized Scrum	Evaluation of the website’s upto-datedness, operations succession and functional performance
The architecture redesign and simplification	Knowledge base creation and maintenance
The source code refactoring	Handling the upcoming requests
Improvement and extension of the custom CMS	Environment configuration to comply with PCI standards
Development of a fully-featured e-commerce module	The system’s migration from reg.ru to o7.com hosting
Unit testing	System backup try-out

Outcomes

Development Team	Support Team
The project requirements got structured and documented	The solution works stably and fast
Development process became well-organized, yet agile. The Customer obtained more control over the team’s progress	The project knowledge base includes 12 requests descriptions, 17 instructions on the core functionality recovery, typical support workflows documentation, cases lists, and more
The source code got cleaner and the solution – easier for monitoring and flexible for escalation	The number of incidents on a new hosting decreased from 100 to 10 per week
The CMS now enables flexible layout building, providing diverse page styles and content blocks’ templates	The overall amount of incidents diminished by 10 times
It is now possible to manage multiple websites’ content from the single control panel
The website is instrumental for instant credit/deposit/mortgage calculation and coins purchase

Dealing with Challenges

Realizing the needs of the Customer’s business, Itransition managed to adjust its processes correspondingly without hurting the quality of the delivered services. We undertook nontypical tasks and coped with the following challenges:

1. Insufficient QA. Initially, there were no QA specialists involved on an ongoing basis. To provide for the necessary control over the software quality, Itransition increased test coverage and introduced code review practices on staging, pre-production and production phases.
2. Blurred project requirements. Itransition analyzed the Customer’s business canvas, helped to define the project requirements and prepared technical and functional documentation.
3. Tight deadlines. The previous vendor was far behind the development schedule, so the Customer was in danger of missing the product release deadline. To deploy the project in time, our team adjusted the schedule, working day and night, and the product was put into production in time.
4. Strict security policy. Due to the Customer’s corporate data security policy, Itransition team was given limited access to the server environment. To deploy monitoring, Itransition implemented non-standard algorithms for gathering metrics via the web panel.
5. Internal team introduction. At the end of 2015, the Customer introduced the internal team to undertake some of the project works. For efficient cooperation, Itransition reorganized the development process, introducing everyday status calls, as well as scheduled synchronization calls of PMs from both sides, sprint estimation meetings and many more.

Customer’s Trust Is Primary Asset

Itransition’s major achievement is the Customer’s absolute trust. They consider Itransition not just a software vendor, but also a reliable partner capable to assist or give valuable advice in all business-related situations.

During collaboration, we were entrusted a great deal of fundamental decisions, including the selection of an alternative hosting provider, substantial system refactoring, when the release was soon.

Pursuing to meet tight deadlines, the Customer asked Itransition team to help their marketing department in website content filling. Our team was also responsible for the recruitment of software engineers for the bank’s internal team, as well as their further training and adaptation to the project. Overall, we conducted 11 job interviews. The company’s HR department extremely delighted with Itransition’s commitment