Increasing our pace of change, AJ Bell’s Journey

Lift off

Over a period of 18 months, we increased our number of monthly releases by an impressive 570%!

We’re serious about change and this shows, with our teams constantly striving to improve their own processes, tools and ultimately performance. It’s an approach that is now firmly embedded in our culture.

How did we get to this though, and what are our next steps?

Building a rocket ship

Rewind 18 months. Development Teams were supporting multiple platforms, releases were manual, and teams were fighting an uphill battle to make change. There was certainly the will to push forwards, but without any clear direction or support it was a struggle to make long-term change whilst also delivering for the business. Does this sound familiar?

With a new CTO, a commitment to technology, and lofty ambitions going into the future, things needed to change, and changes came quick. So, what did we do?

Aligning behind common goals

We re-aligned our Development Teams with each of our core products, creating ownership and therefore empowering teams to take more responsibility for their own platforms. This has led to a huge shift in mentality – not just within Technology Services, but also across the business – and has enabled teams to really start driving technological improvements forwards, gradually ditching legacy technologies and rolling out more modern frameworks.

Shifting left

We changed our central DevOps function, aligning DevOps Engineers to each of our Product Development Teams, meaning each team had full control of their own tooling and releases. To further enable this, we set up a core Automation Team to help unlock new technology and break down any barriers, meaning that our teams could focus on delivering and improving their own platforms, utilising the tools being implemented by the Automation Team.

Working groups

Several multi-discipline working groups were set up to further accelerate changes, each with set goals such as modernising our development practices, or progressing our ‘cloud first’ strategy.

These working groups were set up with representation from across Technology Services. This ensured Developers, Infrastructure Engineers, Testers, Software Architects and other roles within Technology all had a voice, so that as we built out what we wanted our future to look like, the people actually using the tools and delivering day-to-day were at the forefront of deciding their own destiny, and, of course, utilising their skills and expertise.

What does this all mean?

With lofty ambitions, we’re on a continuous journey, constantly looking to improve and learn. AJ Bell is a company which is making the right moves in the right direction, and with fantastic buy-in from senior leadership it will continue making fast progress. Going into 2022, we’ll be making further improvements to our technology stacks, speeding up deployments and focusing heavily on developer experience. Get in touch if you want to be a part of this journey!

By Andy, Agile Practices and Delivery Lead