“Using SAFe to deploy agility at scale across our product factory has been fundamental to putting in place the mindset necessary for our transition to DevOps across our value chain. We still have further to go on this journey, but the benefits we see have proven that the SAFe framework was the right choice to accelerate our transformation.”
—Jonathan Coyle, Head of Agile Factory Operations, Murex

We’re not always able to share company names due to confidentiality, but we can tell you that there is a groundswell of SAFe adoption in the financial tech space. It makes sense given how regulatory changes, disruptive technologies, and a fluid competitive landscape are redefining what it means to compete in the financial services sector.

But we can share this one! Our latest case study from Murex is a great example of how one such company took on those challenges. The Paris-headquartered global financial software company was contending with complex and growing customer demands to keep up with changing regulations, and to improve legacy IT processes.

They launched ambitious initiatives to bring Agile practices to the entire product development division, along with transforming product delivery with DevOps. Their goal: continuous flow of value into client production.

To meet their goals, they turned to SAFe and Scaled Agile Gold Partner Inspearit for coaching and training.

Murex applied SAFe to both its product development and the infrastructure supporting product development, and created a Value Stream for each. They follow iteration-based development on a two-week cadence with a continuous delivery pipeline. Batch sizes, iterations, and feedback cycles—all hallmarks of DevOps best practices—were all reduced.

Murex was also excited to have begun piloting a DevOps approach for client rollouts and upgrades. In pilot tests, the DevOps approach has shown promising results and is fostering more collaborative relations with clients. Already, smaller changes flow to production more easily, reducing the challenges associated with large releases.

With a DevOps flow for both Value Streams, the company drove measurable results on numerous benchmarks:

• 10X faster production-like testing – Teams can now simulate 10 weeks of real production activity in a single weekend
• Complete testing in just one hour, instead of days – The full testing cycle dropped from five days to just one hour, making it possible to run this full suite to customize each new customer configuration
• 85% reduction in user story cycle time – Internal user story cycle time dropped from 90 days to 15 days
• Lower release cost for internal IS – The time to release for the internal test management system dropped from 37 man-days to two
• Happier employees – 95 percent of those asked would not want to return to the old way of working (pre-SAFe)

Just as critical as the numbers, Murex’s people have embraced the mindset required to make the transformation.

To learn more about how Murex met its goals, check out the complete case study.

Special thanks to those who helped create the Murex case study, including Jonathan Coyle, Head of Agile Factory Operations, and Nicole Fisher, Global Marketing Communications Manager.

Stay SAFe,
—Dean