Case studies.

The challenge

Actio Consulting were asked by Capital One Bank to complete an upgrade to the FICO Vectus Case Management system. The project had been running for some time but had stalled and was failing to deliver any benefits to the business, as it could not be made into an operational system. This was an important project for Capital One as FICO Vectus underpinned their UK Credit Card business.

What we did

We undertook a complete review of the state of the stalled project and identified a number of areas that were stopping the delivery from being successful. We re-focused the Scrum team on the user needs and refreshed the backlog to ensure that the outstanding scope was understood and prioritised. We re-engaged the senior stakeholders and Product Owner, who had drifted away from the project after it had stalled and reintroduced Scrum ceremonies to get the team working together again. Our approach allowed us to bring together a number of operational areas and identify the blockers to delivery. We identified that the Scrum team were spending most of their time working on issues that were passed to them from the Helpdesk as bugs, but where no analysis had been done to understand what were bugs with the upgrade and what were issues with the existing system. We introduced a triage function to review all items passed to the team and discovered that there were very few genuine bugs with the system. Doing this allowed the Scrum team to get back to delivering on the original upgrade scope and successfully deliver the objectives of the project.

Results

The ACUK approach to collaborative project delivery bringing together all teams involved in delivery and operations, allowed for the speedy identification of issues and blockers and for clear owners of items to be assigned. This resulted in the successful completion of the upgrade project and the release of large savings for Capital One Bank alongside a faster and better experience for customers. We were also asked to undertake a review of other projects and identified several that were not delivering value to Capital One and should therefore be closed down resulting in significant savings.