BT Financial Group

BT Financial Group is the wealth management arm of Westpac Group and provides customers with a full spectrum of wealth services. These include investment, superannuation and retirement income products, investment platforms, financial advice, and private banking.

BT Panorama is the $450 million Wealth Management Technology Platform of BT Financial Group, with over $144 billion in funds under management and administration.

“Panorama currently manages 74 applications, and we produced 39 releases in 2015 using various environments,” says Marc Dovico, Senior Project Manager at BT Financial Group.

Complexity and Downtimes

The BT Panorama platform was experiencing difficulty managing release scope and budget. BT Panorama needed to coordinate a broad, complex portfolio of IT systems, with a mixture of Waterfall and Agile teams continuously delivering business-driven changes to the market.

“The complexity of the independent systems, poor planning, and test environments caused significant, unexpected downtime and costly delays,” says Dovico. “With so many moving parts, we looked for a tool that provided greater transparency and control of releases and test environments.”

BT Financial Group had no unified repository of release information. Users were required to piece together the shape of a release from multiple sources. “We lacked visibility and tools that supported governance and stakeholder management, which was leading to project delays and a significant risk of outages,” says Dovico.

“Plutora enabled us to improve all aspects of our test environment management service and increased our overall productivity by 15%.”Marc Dovico, Senior Project Manager, BT Financial Group

Supporting IT with Detailed Insight

After choosing Plutora as its test environment solution, BT Financial Group quickly gained greater visibility and control over all its environments. With the ability to create real-time dashboards that showed the schedule and releases, BT Financial Group was able to track and improve deployment planning.

“Plutora’s ability to track changes from development through over 245 various environments into production has been essential to our success,” says Dovico. Plutora works with BT Financial Group’s existing tools and integrates with Projects and Portfolio Management (PPM), IT Service Management (ITSM), Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), and Continuous Delivery (CD) toolsets to provide flexibility in methods of integration.

“With environment alerting and notifications to stakeholders and visibility of environment bookings, Plutora has helped us deliver where the information was incomplete,” says Dovico. “We all believe that Plutora reduces our operational risk and increases our productivity.”

Using Plutora to Drive Business Success

Since engaging with Plutora, BT Panorama has been able to achieve a Return on Investment (ROI) of $464,512 (1,222%) and a payback period of under two months. BT Financial Group has now improved the use of its IT Department’s time and resources, and reduced dependency on key personnel, which has led to fewer outages and project delays.

“Plutora allows us to have greater visibility, transparency, and control of environment composition that ensures the right configuration has been applied to environments at the right time,” says Dovico. “We now have better insight into our IT projects’ team of release and test environment managers.”

“We all believe that Plutora reduces our operational risk and increases our productivity.”Marc Dovico, Senior Project Manager, BT Financial Group