How to carry out successful large-scale digital transformation? For OP Financial Group, it is as much about culture as tech and tools: Balancing technological changes with team coordination, communication and collaboration. With Polar Squad as their partner, they have initiated a grassroots cultural transformation. They’ve also reduced development lead times while increasing the frequency and quality of their deployments.

With some 12,000 employees in Finland and the Baltics, OP Financial Group is one of Finland’s most prominent financial services companies and a forward-thinking developer of its digital ecosystem and tools.

As part of their internal development, OP is looking to create an environment where continuous improvement enables more meaningful and impactful work. They are also in the middle of transitioning to cloud-based operations. They sought a partner to help speed up these processes and provide validation and insights from our experts about best practices across industry limits. To meet these needs, they started a collaboration with Polar Squad.

Culture-driven transformation

With OP being a financial institution, having the proper domain knowledge is essential for effective operations. They also emphasize communication, teamwork and processes. With Polar Squad, OP had four main goals:

• Speed up their cloud adoption

• Improve their current ways of working by adopting DevOps methodologies and processes throughout their service teams

• Revise and simplify software release operations by assessing present processes and enabling automation

• Encourage a culture of continuous improvement and experimentation

As OP is a massive entity, our assignment was explorative. OP wanted to uncover their underlying issues, team by team, and set goals in collaboration with Polar Squad’s experts to find points of improvement.

Effecting change, team by team

Research was the natural starting point for us. We built on OP’s existing assessment materials to conduct DevOps maturity assessments within their service teams. Teams could estimate their maturity within the CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement and Sharing) framework and highlight key points of improvement.

After gaining situational awareness, we went team by team to build the groundwork for company-wide changes in processes. We created avenues for individual as well as team-based training:

• For individuals, we acted as mentors for OP’s internal Software Academy. In DevOps study groups, experts could reflect on their processes and discuss how they can holistically improve work at OP.

• For teams, we contributed to OP’s dojo framework with DevOps dojos. Dojos are sessions where teams can talk about challenges they’re facing and get assistance in improving their DevOps capabilities.

In addition to mentoring and dojos, we established knowledge-sharing communities and “ask-me-anything” meetings. To get people interested and involved, we collaborated with OP’s internal marketing teams to promote these new practices and DevOps initiatives.

To improve team-level processes in more than 100 teams, we participated in designing the transformation of their development practices and scaling them. The goal was to enable stream-aligned teams that focus on a single, impactful stream of work and evolve as needs change. A key development point was to foster agile methodologies and culture. Most importantly, we helped build a culture of sharing – a model of internal open-sourcing, where tools and practices are easy to adopt across teams.

On the technical side, we developed a CI/CD platform that adds features on top of AWS CodePipeline, making it easier for teams to adopt it. As part of modernizing their tooling, we’ve introduced CDK Pipelines as another key technology.

Beyond the changes that affect OP’s daily operations, Polar Squad has helped build the roadmap for OP’s tech practices. This has involved planning and discussions about OP’s future ways of working.

On the path to continuous improvement

The transformational process has led to a positive cycle of improvement, and while there is a lot of work ahead, the results have been very encouraging. We have systematically improved ways of working within teams, which sparked broad interest in DevOps methodologies.

We tracked four key metrics:

1. Lead time

2. Deployment frequency

3. Change failure rate

4. Time to recover

With our help, lead times have improved, while deployment frequency and the quality of releases have increased. Overall, teams are paying more attention to building value for end-users.

Adjusting ways of working has positively impacted the culture, with continuous learning and continuous improvement being key aspects. Teams and individual experts are systematically improving their daily work and learning by experimentation.

Right now, Polar Squad and OP continue to foster DevOps maturity within OP by building better toolsets, processes and collaborative capabilities together.

Key points for DevOps transformation

1. Know the environment. Your field might set some boundaries or legal limitations that constrain automation. Good examples of such fields are banking and the public sector.

2. Map your organization. DevOps methodologies are wide-ranging in their effects on your organization – ensure that you know the teams and people affected and get them aware and involved in the process ahead of time.

3. Assess the current state. Have you implemented automation processes? What is your culture like? Are you ready to move forward with your transformation?

4. Clear the confusion. New agile and lean methodologies only take hold if the entire organization is on board and has a shared understanding of the concepts and how they are implemented in your company – not to mention the need for technical maturity to change ways of working.

5. Build change from the ground up. Get early innovators involved in the definition of your transformation – it ensures key people are invested in the process.

6. Experiment. A new idea needs to be tested within your organization to determine its potential. Don’t fear failures; build a light enough process for experimentation.

7. Keep your eye on the big picture. A successful transformation is concerned with both tech and culture.

8. Be realistic about the scope. The bigger your organization, the longer it takes to change it. A typical partially successful transformation only involves the tech teams and fails to engage other teams and stakeholders. Wide-reaching, permanent transformation takes every relevant party into account.

Want to get on the path to transforming your culture and technology? Let’s talk!

Contact Lasse Mäki:
lasse.maki@polarsquad.com
+358 451 635 616