AHEAD | Canada Life Case Study
Background
In 2019 Canada Life embarked on a period of significant transformation, seeking to modernise aging infrastructure and remap their product offerings around a platform business and new technical architecture.
The transformation would impact many areas of the organisation, including integrating third party vendors and in some cases the repatriation of previously outsourced services back into the core business.
Centred around a new digital strategy, Canada Life sought to bring UX / functionality benefits to their user community deploying modern agile practices and engineering techniques.
The Challenge
To deliver the ambitions of the transformation, Canada Life required a Testing partner who could establish and quickly scale a robust Testing Operation to meet the needs of the Programme. Proven experience of working within the platform space was seen as essential, including specific technology vendor knowledge.
While targeted Test Professionals existed in the organisation, without assistance the internal function would not have been able to meet the demands – scale, size, complexity – of the transformation programme and wider project change.
The Solution
AheadMG were engaged to structure, lead and orchestrate the test programme of work, using their extensive platform domain knowledge and expertise. This involved creating a comprehensive test strategy before moving to set up a test capability, complete with new processes, templates, approaches to work and test standards.
Over the period of the engagement (four years to date), AheadMG has deployed core and specialist capabilities to work alongside internal and third party vendors, including Programme Test Management, Test Management, Lead Testers, Platform Test Analysts, QA Engineers, Automation Leads, NFT Managers and NFT Analysts.
Heading up the programme’s Test Function, AheadMG promoted a ‘one-team’ culture, delivering the engagement via;
- Deploying their Financial Services / Wealth Platform Expertise
- Designing and implementing new Integrated Test Strategy
- Development of centralised test function supported by templates, processes and standards
- Integrated Testing into the SDLC Agile/DevOps approach (making various enhancement throughout the programme)
- Comprehensive Regression Strategy
- Development of Automation Function, including DevOps alignment and integrations for enterprise scheduling and real-time reporting via Grafana
- Orchestrated Vendors, delivering to a single Test/release plan
- Integrated daily SAST scanning into JIRA (including self-raising tickets)
- Development of Performance Test capability
- Roll out of JIRA to the programme, including full administration for first 2 years
- Effective Account Management, via Scorecard approach, to ensure the health of the engagement and to adapt to changing client needs.
The Benefits
By building a trusted and open relationship with the Client, AheadMG was able to consistently deliver quality outcomes throughout the programme and into other project assignments within the wider organisation. By sharing a common desire for innovation and improvements with the Client, AheadMG was able to adapt quickly to address new challenges by modifying approaches and evolving their technical testing methods.
As a result of the partnership between AheadMG and the client, Canada Life has a more predictable and modern test delivery capability, underpinned by effective ways of working, solid core templates, processes and standards.
In additional to the core programme, AheadMG have also supported Canada Life’s wider portfolio, including projects which sought to deliver migrations, policy admin upgrades, transition to the cloud and integration of new web offerings.
Through the implementation of JIRA and Test Management tool and integrations out to third party software such as Veracode and synchronisation with third party software providers, Canada Life has a mature Change and LifeCycle Management solution which has been configured to support real time intervention, by enabling real time MI.
Building a winning partnership based on innovation, collaboration and aligned goals. AheadMG look forward to supporting Canada Life with future test requirements.
“I have worked with the AheadMG team in various organisations and have always been impressed by their professionalism and real dedication to the work. The partnership we developed was extremely strong and for me the development of that partnership only happens when a consultancy group really invests in the relationship. In addition, Andy and the team have a specific knowledge of Platforms and associated technology, developed over a number of years, which proved to be invaluable during what were very challenging deliveries”
Pat Cox (Director of Change, Transformation and Governance)