Partnering to drive change with a large North American bank

Partnership Overview

The Select Group’s (TSG) client, a large North American bank, was undergoing a merger with another major bank. The organization needed significant help across multiple divisions as they pushed toward customer day one and the official public-facing presence as the merged entity. Additionally, they required continuing integration applications, tools, and infrastructure between these two separate companies.

The Select Group is partnering with these key divisions for statement of work (SOW) services:

• Financial Crimes
• Commercial, Payments and Personal Wealth
• Business Unit CSIOs
• Project Management Office (PMO)
• Retail and Small Business
• Cyber

Solution

Through several separate services SOWs, TSG is providing development, integration, validation, security and testing services across the bank. The work primarily consists of managing application and feature development, validation, and testing to ensure the future-state of the organization can deliver required services and capabilities to internal and external clients.

• Some of these services require development capability for legacy applications as well as software development, microservices, API integration and testing of new applications and features.
• Underlying support across many of these divisional requirements includes security, business analysis support, and infrastructure services.

The Select Group assigned engagement managers, who are with experienced in Agile and project management, to each SOW. This ensured the hiring aligned with project needs, service quality is monitored, and performance issues on the teams are addressed.

Technologies, Platforms and Development Methodologies

The following technologies and platforms were in scope with this client:

Connectors

• Web Services Connectors
• Database Connecter
• Oracle Connector
• ERP Connector
• Oracle Identity Management (OIM) 11G R2 suite
• Oracle Access Manager (OAM)
• Oracle Directory Services
• Oracle Identity Federation
• Oracle Unified Directory
• OIM Administration
• OIM Connectors, OIM Adapters, SOA Composite, and OIM APIs
• APIs and Data Synchronization
• J2EE, Web Services (SOAP, REST)
• Ping, Okta and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
• Network Security – IDS, Firewall, Network Access Control
• PEGA/SSIS
• BPM and Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)
• SQL
• XML/JSON
• Web Development – Angular/React + .Net (C#) + SQL) JavaScript, JQuery
• RESTful API’s and ODATA

The following development methodologies were leveraged:

• Front-end development
• Azure DevOps pipelines including Automated Unit and UI Tests
• Testing frameworks – Jasmine and Mocha
• CI / CD pipeline and creation
• Waterfall, Agile, Scrum and Kanban used across multiple teams

Testing

Our client operates in a Test-Driven Development (TDD) environment. Various test platforms and test processes are applied via TDD:

• Selenium WebDriver and Java Automated Testing
• xUnit Testing Framework
• Microsoft, Team Foundation Server (TFS) also used in execution of test cases.
  • End-to-end testing
  • System integration testing
  • Regression testing
  • Mainframe testing
  • Integration/interface testing

Agile and Waterfall Approach

Across multiple teams, TSG has deployed more than 60 resources, including:

• Scrum Masters and Project Managers
• Solution Architects
• External Access Authorization and Oracle Identity Management Developers
• Test Engineers
• Integration Engineers
• PEGA Developers
• Cyber and RSA engineers

For Agile projects, our teams implemented daily scrums, sprints, product and sprint backlogs.  Discovery phases are used to fully scope the team, establish sprint velocity, prioritize and groom backlog, transfer knowledge, and determine business priorities. This allows the teams to adjust scope as needed, throughout the entire duration of the projects, to begin development and testing phases with a better understanding of team cadence, user story approach, and testing dependencies.

Service Duration

Each SOW The Select Group is engaging in is a minimum 15 months in direct support of the company’s merger activities. For support on business as usual or board-level priority projects, SOW’s are typically 12-months with extensions.