VDR company accelerates delivery

Client:
VDR Company
Industry:
Financial Services
Technology and Platforms:
Angular, .NET, Azure Cloud and On-prem Infrastructure, Azure Cloud Services and third-party integrations

Markets fluctuate, regulations evolve, technology advances, and through it all, one of the US-based leading global risk and compliance solution companies delivers confidence with the right solutions in moments that matter. It provides domain expertise, enterprise software, and data analytics for every stage of its client’s business and investment lifecycles.

Some of the largest firms in the world entrusted this VDR company with deals on IPOs, mergers, and acquisitions worth billions of dollars. Its award-winning VDR solution allows Fortune 500 companies, startups, private equity firms, and investment banks to share confidential information in real-time with potential investors or other stakeholders. Powered by AI and other forms of automation, the virtual data room platform allows filtering and viewing content in a way that brings the most value and visibility to users. With such a tech-heavy project, the provider needed assistance to modernize its existing practices. This brought the company to Forte Group.

Challenge

After divesting from its parent company, the VDR solutions provider wanted to radically morph into a technology-first, digitally transformed business and fundamentally modernize its outdated legacy systems. For the company, the cost and the time-to-market of implementing new features into the legacy system became a barrier to reaching business goals. Plus, retention of quality in these legacy systems required significant effort to maintain.

In short, these legacy systems were a hurdle that had to be overcome. The company’s leadership chose to kick off a transformation into a modernized digital platform while keeping continuous new features delivery on track.

While the provider already had an established IT leadership team, the company needed additional support in setting up the delivery center with an engineering talent pool. Additionally, the company also required a team of experienced managers and architects who could design and develop effective and performant software and quality assurance practices. They would allow for a fast testing cycle, and therefore enable more frequent released to production with guaranteed quality.

Forte brought both managerial, design, and engineering expertise and ramped up teams dedicated to the development of the features, automated quality assurance, and production support. Once the teams were in place, senior members of the Forte team collaboratively set up an agile delivery process connected with the company’s in-house engineering and product teams.

Solution

Forte’s solutions architecture team began with an assessment of the company’s existing engineering practice. This involved a discovery process to understand how the company’s engineering worked with the business expectations and how those aligned with new feature release frequency, quality, and performance. Following this discovery phase, the solutions architects formulated a detailed roadmap that outlined a path to improving engineering practices and scaling teams while ensuring knowledge transfer and operational metrics of success.

What followed was the implementation of an effective and agile product delivery system that allows for a predictable cadence of new features releases with quality, aligning to the VDR provider’s business priorities.

Since the solution had a sophisticated production infrastructure landscape already in place, the Forte managed services team introduced deployment process automation with mandatory post-deployment verification practices. This included embedded production components telemetry gathering with health checks and alerting on critical events.

These agile process improvements created increased product maturity throughout the entire organization. With improved feature planning, software design, engineering culture, delivery and quality assurance prowess, a predictable release strategy, and customer support, the provider has catapulted the solution into an industry-leading VDR platform.

"Our main goal, besides delivering business value and helping our client remain competitive on the market, was to continuously instill an improved software delivery culture. As a software product delivery partner, we did our best to arm the organization with the best development practices and processes across the entire SDLC, from backlog management to SRE and production support. Now, when frequent and stable release cadence becomes a norm, the engineering and product management at our client has tools, practices, trained personnel, and a reliable basement to move towards the next stage of their product maturity."
Egor Goryachkin, Senior Technology Director at Forte Group

Through the managed product services provided by Forte, the fintech provider was able to create a world-class engineering management culture, scale teams, and achieve a predictable frequency of delivery with high quality. This fostered the creation of better product development processes, including improved discipline, transparency, business flexibility, quality assurance, delivery, and — ultimately — organizational buy-in.

When the project needed product leadership, the Forte managed services team assumed that role until the in-house team had the tools and techniques needed to take the reins. In the case of this product, a managed services partner helped to fill gaps in delivery while establishing processes that injected greater maturity and expertise into the delivery process.

Here’s what the four-year ongoing partnership with the Forte team allowed to achieve:

Create an updated application with a modernized user interface and user experience
Improved performance of the critical user flows in the application up to several times in speed
Implemented non-blocking UI with push notifications of the operation progress and completion
Developed smart reporting: now users can get analytical information about who interacts with documents, schedule daily reports structured according to the company’s needs
Introduced numerous engineering practices and improvements: test automation practices with transparent test coverage and test execution pass-rate reporting, performance, and load testing practices, release candidate go/no-go quality gate, product quality metrics
Continuous evolution to the new domain-driven design with high-cohesion and low-coupling modular architecture, which allows zero-downtime deployment, automated deployment, and roll-back