Client Profile:
A leading UK-based bank offering Wealth Management, Private Banking, Investment, and Asset Management services. Operating in a highly regulated and competitive financial environment, the bank sought to increase engineering efficiency, accelerate delivery, and reduce technical debt through DevOps transformation.
Engagement Overview:
TEKMentors was engaged to address the bank’s slow, manual engineering processes and lack of collaboration across teams. The client faced challenges in scaling development, maintaining quality, and keeping pace with the competition. The objective was to streamline delivery through automation, cultural transformation, and process modernization.
Context & Challenges:
- Engineering processes were largely manual, error-prone, and lacked repeatability
- Siloed teams with poor collaboration and low tool adoption
- Slow speed to market, making innovation slower than peers
- Software quality was inconsistent due to ineffective testing and release practices
TEKMentors’ Solution:
- Platform & System Evaluation:
Reviewed all platform systems and prioritised those with the highest potential for transformation. - Current State Assessment:
Conducted detailed assessments across multiple value streams to identify inefficiencies and opportunities. - Engineering Interventions:
Introduced DevOps practices including Git, TeamCity, Docker, and Ansible to enable consistent builds, integration, and deployments. - Process Automation:
Improved test automation coverage and CI/CD pipeline execution to accelerate quality releases. - Cultural Shift & Training:
Enabled cross-functional teams to adopt new ways of working with hands-on training, pairing, and DevOps playbooks.
Key Outcomes:
- Release Velocity: Increased the number of annual releases from 10 to 15
- Test Automation: Raised automation coverage from 20% to 50% for high-priority P1/P2 test cases
- Cycle Time Improvement: Reduced cycle time from Backlog to Production from 6 months to 90 days
- Engineering Efficiency: Waste was significantly reduced by modernising repetitive tasks
- Defect Reduction: Brought down defect rates from 25% to 10% in SIT and UAT phases
- Employee Engagement: Boosted morale and happiness by empowering teams with tools and ownership
Impact: The DevOps implementation enabled the bank to overcome its delivery bottlenecks and adopt a culture of speed, reliability, and accountability. With modern automation and improved collaboration, teams now deploy software faster, with higher quality, and with deeper alignment to business priorities. TEKMentors played a key role in building internal capabilities and sustainable practices that continue to evolve with the bank’s growth.
