Our customer was actively engaged in a long-term modernization and migration effort of its accounts receivable system, shifting the platform from a mainframe system to a cloud-based microservices architecture. The architectural patterns and technology choices were highly focused on event-sourcing, utilizing Spring Webflux and Cassandra. In the current state of their ecosystem, leadership had concerns about the system’s performance and improvements to their organizational structure, ways of working, and the developer experience.

Without informed expertise and advice on the state of development and their practices, the project would have faced continued struggles and problems further compromising delivery deadlines, directly increasing the overall cost of development to the business.

Ippon delivered an approach that sought first to clearly understand the problems the organization was facing and how they were working through the delivery of an engineering modernization assessment inspired by DORA and the AWS WAFR over 6 weeks, tailored specifically to their organization and the problems they were facing. Ippon conducted face-to-face interviews with many of the client’s staff engineers, architects, engineering leaders, and product specialists to better understand the landscape, while also surveying the organization to provide feedback from all engineers involved in the platform.

The assessment focused on:

• System Architecture
• DevOps & Delivery
• Governance and Process

The data collected from this survey resulted in a comprehensive and informative report to leadership complete with recommendations to address issues over the short and long term, as well as a workshop to incorporate the solutions discussed into the organization’s roadmap.

In addition to this report, two proofs of concept from a list of options identified during the assessment phase were also delivered to further highlight the performance and developer experience improvements that could be achieved.

The outcome resulted in numerous recommendations around system architecture, the client’s DevOps & delivery practices, and changes to governance and engineering processes across the organization. The overall objective of these recommendations aimed to cut the end-of-day processing time in half, reduce feature cycle time by 20%, and maintain or lower the 3% change failure rate that was actively observed. Additionally, leadership was able to leverage these recommendations to shape imminent organizational changes taking place to better serve their development initiatives.

The customer is a global financial services company best known for its credit cards with various rewards programs but also offers charge cards, business and prepaid cards, and bill payment services. A publicly traded company, this client boasts a large network of merchants while maintaining its distinct brand from other credit card giants.

“So far this engagement has been nothing short of fantastic; I work with multiple partners and this team has been absolute rock stars - you all are actually helping with value co-creation”