ANZ Investment Bank

Challenge

To gain control of development processes and achieve CMM Level 5 requirements with an integrated solution

Solution

Serena Dimensions

Global financial leader
 

With a history of more than 150 years, ANZ has grown to be one of the largest banks in the world with more than $177B in assets. Over the years, ANZ has expanded its operations for international banking and financial services. Its headquarters are located in Melbourne, Australia with offices throughout Australia, Asia, Europe, New Zealand, the Pacific, and the United States. ANZ helps millions of customers with everything from managing personal funds to investment portfolios and supporting global business.

Requirements for an enterprise change management framework

The ANZ Investment Banking division (ANZIB) operates many critical business systems, including a global foreign exchange application for front office trading called GFX Live. ANZ already owned a tool for software configuration management but it didn’t meet the needs for GFX Live. There were many objectives that needed to be accomplished when choosing a solution for this application. It was extremely important for the solution to have end-to-end change management. ANZ needed to segregate the duties between different departments, such as development and deployment, as well as different users. The change management solution also needed to integrate both the management of third party developed code as well as internally developed source code for customizations. For example, ANZ needed to have an integrated version, issue, and build management solution that was able to enforce the corporate business rules and processes.

According to Phil Kerr, Senior Project Manager at ANZ, “Having an audit trail was an extremely important component for ANZIB. It was imperative for us to trace the versions of software code back to a Change Request and be able to see differences between released objects and the versions of code used to create them.” An audit trail was also important for management to see who was working on what, when, and why and being able to associate a user to a Work Request.

Managing the development process was critical for ANZ. The chosen solution needed the ability to easily determine and track the content of releases so the company knew what was where. It also needed to be able to take a snapshot of GFX Live at any point in time and use that as a basis for building new releases. Then, they needed to be able to see the differences of the newly developed work to the previous baseline. “In addition, we needed to run a complete or partial build process easily and automatically when we needed,” states Kerr.

ANZIB required their enterprise change management framework to have a release capability that allowed different file types to be placed in different directories. Then, they needed to be able to send these releases from development to production without using FTP. “Finally, we needed the solution to be accessible via the Internet or intranet. This would allow people to access their work from anywhere at anytime and reduce the administration,” says Kerr.

Conclusion

ANZIB chose Serena Dimensions for their enterprise change management needs. Dimensions offered ANZIB the end-to-end solution they needed. As one single tool, it provides comprehensive process control, versioning, baseline management, issue management, release management, and build and workflow management. These capabilities are supported with automatically enforced change processes that are 100% determined and easily customized by ANZ.

“Dimensions has performed very well for us. We now have a fully integrated enterprise change management framework. Our processes are repeatable and controlled,” explains Kerr. “We have an audit trail so we can easily see what has been sent in a release and this helps us achieve CMM Level 5 requirements.” With a web client interface, Dimensions allows developers the functionality they need while reducing administration with zero client software required. “Additionally, because Dimensions provides a client-server environment, ANZ’s releases can be sent from a server to any other Dimensions client, whether it is on PC or UNIX.”

Kerr concludes, “Dimensions has allowed us to gain a better understanding of our development environment. We can easily see who is working on what, why they are working on it, and easily differentiate user’s responsibilities. We allow the end users to perform their tasks and not worry about what is going on somewhere else. We have developed our own processes and fit those in to Dimensions. And finally, we have been successful.”