Case study

SEB Pension

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I have a lot of experience working with different offshoring companies.

However, this is the first time I have worked with someone who could also provide professional consultancy at a corporate level.

This is a unique combination and it makes me very comfortable working with Ciklum.

Jakob Nielsen, IT and Offshoring Manager

About SEB Pension Denmark SEB Pension is Denmark’s fourth largest commercial pension fund that provides qualified consulting servi-ces to around 300.000 private, self-employed, and employed via company agreements clients. It is the leading online pension fund that develops life insurance as well as pension solutions and boasts the highest customer satisfaction ratings.

SEB in Denmark employs 730 people (325 from SEB Pension). Other business areas include banking, asset management, credit card, and stock trading. The company is a part of SEB Group – one of the largest Nordic financial corporations with 5 million customers, more than 16.000 employees in 20 countries around the world.

The Situation (challenges and goals)

Please describe the situation (e.g. challenges you were facing) that made you look for external consultancy support. What were the main goals you wanted to achieve as part of this engagement? Implementing complex Danish legislation within life insurance, pension, and inheritance law areas, the IT Processes Department in SEB Pension develops a variety of solutions in collaboration between the two development teams in Denmark and Malaysia. There are 50 employees in Copenhagen and 50 in Kuala Lumpur that work closely together across borders on the same releases.

Having used Agile (Scrum) as their development framework since 2006, the IT Processes Department saw a need to re-launch it in order to get better pro-cesses, become more effective and truly Agile as an organization. As a complex company with many legacy systems, old contracts, SEB Pension has a huge maintenance part as well as the need for new development work. “We are number one on the Internet in the catego-ry “Pension” and we want to keep that position. In order to do that we simply needed to become more effective, because we could see that there was less and less time for new development and prioritization between projects and maintenance became more and more difficult”, explains Jakob Nielsen, IT and Offshoring Manager.

Hence, there was a concrete need for more transparency in how they run the projects, getting their backlog in place and clearer burn-down charts in order to make effective prioritization of the tasks and estimations.

Why did you choose Ciklum? What was the target consultancy framework selected?

Being used to working cross-border with offshore teams in Ukraine, Pakistan, India and Malaysia, Jakob Nielsen knew what he was looking for. Based on a previous project, the Private Pension App, Jakob sta-ted that Ciklum was capable of delivering results very fast and with good quality.

“When it comes to more concrete IT projects, I have been Very satisfied with all deliveries from Ciklum. Therefore, it was obvious for me to choose Ciklum as our consulting partner”, says Jakob Nielsen. “I could see the way they were running their own operations was effective and I would like our organization to run in the same way.”

“Not having a backlog makes it difficult to plan ahead and makes people insecure regarding what to do next. We had many ideas but the process of ideas maturing would end up in a team instead of a backlog. Therefore, there was no transparency and we could not compare ideas or see when to stop a bad idea before it turned into a project. We started being agile in the end flow and we had to systematize the process from start to end.”

Among other goals that SEB Pension wanted to achieve by engaging Ciklum Consulting team were:

• Making people work in similar ways in different areas

• Clearer definition of different roles in their IT organization, particularly in an Agile concept.

• Standardization in using the same electronic tools across the organization

Yuriy Malishenko, Ciklum Engagement Manager, Portfolio and Program Consultant,

Jakob Nielsen, SEB Pension IT and Offshoring Manager.

The Solution – The Implementation Process

In a summary format, please describe what has been done as part of the engagement. What were the key milestones?

The engagement of Ciklum Consultancy team consisting of six people started in November 2013 by their onsite visits and interviews in Denmark and Malaysia.

“The purpose of the initial visit was to investigate our current situation in order to face the challenges”, says Jakob. “The consultancy team became a natural part of our organization and through the interviews with relevant people they managed to clarify the gaps and challenges”.

“Sometimes it can be difficult to change the workflow in “mature” organizations because people are used to working in a certain way and they do not like change. However, the team from Ciklum broke down all barriers and developers, project managers and other employees from our company were positive and they could all see the benefits of working in new ways.”

Jakob underlines, that Ciklum’s consultants were able to break down the barrier of “an outsider”, because the team had a professional background and a good toolbox when it came to agile development, mean-ing the combination of empathy and being capable of explaining why and how you can become more effective running Agile.

This is a major change management

project. Ciklum has really helped us to

change the way we work and

organize our operations

Jakob Nielsen, IT and Offshoring Manager.

“Furthermore, by being theoretically strong, self-con-fident, capable of breaking down complex issues and making arguments in the right way, the consultants got some of SEB’s most rejective people to actu-ally become some of the best in working with the U-tools here in Denmark”, elaborates Jakob.

“The Consultants team made changes in how we worked as a team. All the different business analytics, content managers, changed from the backlog run-ning in Excel sheets to our backlog in Jira”, describes Jakob. “Ciklum also coached and trained our teams in order to make them work in the Agile way and each role was defined for each employees in the organization.”

Yuriy Malishenko, Ciklum Engagement Manager, Portfolio and Program Consultant, who participated in the Consulting program with SEB Pension, shared his impressions from working with the client:

“We have done a colossal work with SEB Pension and it was a true collaboration. They were interested in improvements, motivated towards changes, hard-working, and friendly.

Moreover, their constructive feedback helped us take into account all the peculiarities of their business area, i.e. insurance/banking. Together with our expertise in Agile and knowledge of the system characteristics, this definitely helped to improve a common solution”.

The Result

Please summarize the key results achieved as part of the engagement for the business overall and the development side specifically. How have your pro-ductivity/organization/communication/processes/roles & responsibilities changed after this engagement? The most important goal that SEB has achieved by engaging Ciklum Consultancy is a clear burn-down rate and the set-up of the system of how the individ-ual teams should run.

“And now all teams across borders - in Malaysia and Denmark are working in the same way”, says Jakob. We have clearly defined processes and clearly defined roles. We now have a system supporting how we run the projects in JIRA, which is set up by the consultants. That gives us more transparency. We have burn-down charts for all the teams now and, overall, that gives us clearer prioritization. Further-more, in Malaysia they have established mixed teams, in which people work cross-technology in the same team”.

According to Jakob, as with any complex Change Management programs, implementation of the system-wide changes is a continuous process and it takes time to get used to new ways of working effectively.

However, he is certain that if SEB Pension keep implementing the structures of the Agile Business Transformation program provided by Ciklum Consultancy team, then they will over time see the improvements in the overall team performance as well as the product quality and shorter time to market.

We have done a colossal work with SEB

Pension and it was a true collaboration.

They were interested in improvements,

motivated towards changes, hard-

working and friendly

Yuriy Malishenko, Ciklum Engagement Manager, Portfolio and Program Consultant.

About Ciklum

Ciklum is a Danish innovative IT outsourcing company specializing in nearshore software development in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine and Belarus. Ciklum’s unique business model merges the human element with IT to not only help companies to grow, but provide ongoing resources that sustain growth with the flexibility to scale up or down as markets shift. Established in 2002, Ciklum employs 2,500+ IT specialists with more than 200 global clients’ own software development teams.

Ciklum has six development offices in Ukraine, one in Belarus, and two in Pakistan, as well as representative offices in Denmark, United Kingdom, Switzerland, United States, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Russia and Israel.

Ciklum is named the 2010 and 2011 Top 100 global services provider and is rated Best Larger IT Employer 2010 & 2011 in Ukraine by , the Ukrainian Community of Software Developers. Most recently Gartner Inc. named Ciklum as a “Cool Vendor” in its ‘Cool Vendors in Application Services, 2013’ report.

Ciklum Consulting Based on experience gained while workingwith 200+ clients both onshore andnearshore we’ll advise on anything relatedto software development efficiency,processes maturity and an ability of IT tosupport your next ambitious business goals.

We can empower or contribute to:

O evaluation of the current software development process efficiency from idea to getting customer feedback

O adopting Agile and adaptive software delivery practices

O setting up the right tools to support teamwork, ensure visibility of the development process to all stakeholders, speed up delivery through DevOps.

To find out how Ciklum can help your business, visitwww.ciklum.com

Or contact us:+45 70 27 80 90. danmark@ciklum.com

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