Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Increases Efficiency at UBL!

UBL Saves 27% on Software Maintenance with Microsoft VSTS’s Collaborative Tools

Overview
Established in 1959, UBL is one of the largest banks in Pakistan. With assets of more than Rs.550 billion, the institution provides coverage through its 1112 branches across the country as well as at several overseas locations.

The IT investments and initiatives are also equally impressive as investments in business verticals.

UBL was the first bank in Pakistan which took initiatives in early 70’s to move towards automation and technology and categorically, in the past 5 years, the bank has made significant investment in establishing and upgradation of IT infrastructures.

The IT BRM Division has been developing, testing, supporting and maintaining software applications which are core to the Business Divisions. The team is responsible for developing new application initiatives, taking care of routine maintenance and upgradation of existing implementations for greater efficiency.

Keeping in view the complex business needs of the Bank, coupled with high availability of the applications makes the job of the Development team a complex task on it own. Analyzing requirements, producing Functional documentations and system design; Quality Assurance, Scalability, Source and Configuration Management, Team communication and incorporating the same in the system can become a hectic job if not properly managed.

The Project Management, Software Development and Testing all play key roles in the Software Development Life Cycle and they should have proper and approved processes for high quality, scalable and secure banking applications. UBL’s IT BRM Division has strong software processes in placed but they previously executed and tracked manually so managing and tracking the current state of the project(s) required good amount of effort.

All these manual processes, documentation, project planning, code writing, source and configuration management, quality assurance, audit and compliance, need to be automated in single and centralized instance so that properly configured applications with the correct versions of their dependencies could finally be deployed and managed in production.

Situation
Compared to other financial institutions in Pakistan, UBL realized very early on that if it wanted to stay ahead of the competition, it would need to roll out products on a very regular basis. In order to accurately package and track these products, the bank needed to be self-reliant as far as its IT support was concerned.

Today, with a team of close to 100 resources on the bank’s IT BRM Division, the organization is relatively independent in servicing both its internal and external customer base however the team was beginning to face another type of challenge. “When our development team, for example, would get a query to roll out a module or solution, we noticed a lot of duplication of work,” explains Mujeeb Mohammad Syed, Head of IT, BRM Division, UBL. Duplication of effort meant the team was unable to efficiently plan, develop or deploy resources to accurately resolve the query, which also increased the chances of error.

UBL already had systems in place. After all, they were servicing their internal business needs by rolling out products and customized solutions for several years. “What we didn’t have was consistency. Without consistency in the development and rollout phases, the Quality Assurance processes always take longer creating the need for constant troubleshooting.” Microsoft VSTS helped establish a framework that enabled the UBL IT team to be more empowered and exert more control when it came to its Software Development Life Cycle.

According to Syed Abid Zaidi, CAS Lead, Enterprise Group Microsoft, “I think what made this implementation as very effective one was the fact that UBL already had informal systems in place and it was just a matter of mapping them into the inserted frameworks and templates that VSTS provided to them.”

What the IT-BRM Division really needed was a collaboration tool to better plan the product or development lifecycle so it could be accurately deployed and subsequently tracked. And that’s why Visual Studio Team System 2008 made so much sense. “They had all the right components in place; the resources, the innovation and the demand to continuously deliver products based on specific and customized needs. What they didn’t have in place was a way to coordinate all the processes to achieve the same objective,” explains Naveed Bajwa, Developer and Platforms Group Manager, Microsoft Pakistan.

Solution
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 has only been in the organization 10 months and UBL was one of the first organizations in Pakistan’s financial sector to adopt it. According to Mujeeb, deployment actually wasn’t the greatest challenge. “Ensuring that our objectives were aligned with what the solution was offering, was the challenge,” he says. Since UBL was the first to implement VSTS in the country, Microsoft Pakistan offered the organization all the training and support it needed.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System helps the organization to better manage its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) model. The solution enables teams to better coordinate the design, development, and deployment of applications along with managing the connections between individuals, roles and teams. The tools help system analysts and project managers not only create better value but also deliver an optimally produced product that is more accurately aligned with the needs of the organization.

The most common reason for the failure of a product can be attributed to the fact that it didn’t satisfy the specs queried by a customer. While the human resource exists to develop and deploy solutions, one of the biggest flaws reside in the lack of process management. Managing complexity requires solutions that bridge the gap between that complexity and the need for coordination and task simplification. Organizations can accomplish this today with Visual Studio Team System 2008.

The infrastructure of the bank is customized to tailor the needs of the entire organization. Mujeeb explains that, “Ensuring that there is technical alignment between the existing infrastructure and a new solution is always a challenge. We ensured that the technical requirements of VSTS fit in with the blueprint of our infrastructure, hence needed to customize the solution before it could be deployed.”

As with any implementation, user buy-in and ownership is critical to the success of the deployment. “It’s all about training and bringing a change in the mindset. It’s about instilling the realization into the team that after the initial teething problems, the solution will actually make the entire department more productive and optimal in its performance,” explains Mujeeb. Since VSTS offers a one-window access to all information flowing in and out of the department, it becomes easier to manage the development processes.

Benefits
“There are two types of ROI when it comes to measuring the impact an implementation such as Microsoft VSTS has had and we look at both the tangible as well as the intangible returns,” comments Mujeeb.

The intangible benefits include more effective Requirement Management, better IT Governance, the ability to have Built-in Process Templates, interoperability of platforms and existing systems and more efficient Quality Assurance.

The financial and tangible benefits include a 20% decrease in development timelines & software maintenance activities, 18% improvement in Software quality and SQA process and 21% more effective Resource Management. “There will be a 27% reduction in software maintenance by end of first quarter 2010 and this figure is estimated to grow up to 50% by the end of the year. We’ve experienced 30% improvement in the team’s overall productivity, with a further projected estimate to go up to 40%. By the end of the 2010 fiscal year and the department should have experienced a 6% increase in personnel cost savings,” says Mujeeb.

What UBL had before the Microsoft VSTS implementation was an IT Team. After the implementation, UBL had a cohesive and collaborative IT team that not only met the business challenges, but were in a position to enable the business to go the distance.

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