Absa: DevOps-as-a-Service

The South African-based Absa Group is a financial services provider offering personal, corporate and investment banking, investment management and insurance policies. They called in our help because they were experiencing issues with their DevOps process.

Challenge

DevOps initiatives were executed in a siloed manner. All BUs developed their own practices and processes largely by themselves. This lack of collaboration and harmonization caused friction in central processes like Change Management throughout the value chain.

Solution

We integrated the ServiceNow change process to the CI/CD pipeline to expedite and automate Change Management. Then, we set up an opt-in self service approach where teams could plug into the central automated change management capability through the Service Catalog, ensuring smooth onboarding of new teams.

Results

We were able to simplify the Change process for DevOps and CI/CD-driven development and reduce the lead time reduced to minutes with auto-collection of change evidence. The opt-in self service onboarding to automated change encouraged many teams from different parts of the organization to line up to consume this DevOps-as-a-Service.

The central service management team was able to provide automated change management as a service, having the DevOps teams within the different BUs lining up to get onboarded to automated change.