How the Corecom Group shaped, enabled and grew the testing capability of a global financial services organisation

Industry/business type: Financial Services 

No of employees: 1000+

The client is the UK division of a global financing company who provide financial services to business and consumers.  Following a recent take-over, the client has reviewed the performance of its IT service providers and has decided to bring its testing service back in house.  This will allow them to adopt agile development techniques and significantly accelerate the time taken to get new products and services into the market.  

The company has an IT department of over 100 with 25 in QA/Test outsourced to India. They were undergoing a big transformation to agile and wanted to bring the QA/Test in-house. This meant that they needed to develop in-house capability but they also needed to continue with their current delivery portfolio whilst going through the transition.

The Challenge

Testing had been outsourced to an offshore partner for several years and this had achieved the initial cost savings required.  Despite this, the service provider did not introduce any innovation or new ways of working into the service and continued to work in a very reactive ‘waterfall’ manner.  The client operates in a very competitive market where the rapid introduction of new products is critical to securing new revenue streams and the testing and release lifecycle was introducing unnecessary delays.

The Solution

Shape: CQE worked with the customer to define the target operating model including the organisational design and key roles. We took a holistic view of the project and took accountability for the performance of all three Corecom Group companies. CQE provided a transformation leader, supported by a team of specialist test consultants, capable of driving and executing and transformation programme of this nature. 

Enable: Once the solution had been shaped, Corecom Consulting enabled the client to deliver on the plan by running branded, targeted, digital recruitment campaigns to find the permanent employees the client needed. The campaign included hiring permanent employees into the leadership team, including an experienced Head of Testing, as well as a team of Test Managers with strong industry experience. Corecom also provided cohorts of expert test contractors across Automation and Performance Engineering as well as Test Leads and Managers during project peaks. 

Grow: To ensure this service became established and sustainable, our client needed to look to the medium and long term. This was achieved by hiring and developing their own people in addition to the specialists from CQE and the permanent recruitment of experienced hires via Corecom Consulting. This was where Corecom Technology Academy (CTA) came in. CTA recruited, trained and mentored a number of highly successful technology professionals made up of university graduates and ambitious career changers that were integrated into the client’s existing teams to sustainably grow their capability in the medium and long term. 

The Results

The Corecom Group has collectively enabled the client to realise a key business objective they believe will increase productivity by 20% and reduce the time to market for new products by 40-50%. By working together as a Group, we were able to: 

• shape a solution to a complex requirement of building a test capability from scratch for a global business

• enabled our client to grow its own capability with experienced technologists through targeted recruitment campaigns

• allowed them to sustain this growth with the integration of multiple CTA academies.