NATIONWIDE

180 its use of Agile substantially in 2011 , so it employed Lean techniques to achieve this . Harking back to the early days of industrialization , Nationwide adopted the idea of a so-called “ software development factory ” complete with development teams that would finish one step needed to create code . Establishing clearly defined key roles for each development team ( such as scrum master , tech lead , requirements lead and test lead ) enabled the replication of best practices across the enterprise , as if it were a factory . The insurer also implemented a visual management system , allowing developers to gain information on the shop floor quickly , as well as Gemba Walks – a fundamental Lean management philosophy . “ Gemba Walks enables leaders to visit the shop floor and to see first-hand the issues teams are facing ,” notes Vasudeva . “ It allows information to flow from frontline teams to senior management in real time . Leaders also become more enmeshed within the workings of the factory instead of managing it in a spreadsheet or a dashboard .” Wanting to scale this even further , Nationwide also showed that these cutting-edge methodologies

could be used not only for computer programming languages like Java but could also be applied to Cobol , Packages and ETL code .

This mammoth investment , Vasudeva says , was starting to pay off . By 2014 , Nationwide ’ s Agile development teams had proven better quality and better productivity using industry benchmarks , and it had also created up to 50 development teams . However , Agile methodol-

FEBRUARY 2019