Alok Uniyal

Hi, everyone. My name is Alok Uniyal, and I lead the Agile and DevOps practice at Infosys. As we all continue to navigate our way through these uncertain times, agility with resilience is clearly the new mantra for success for enterprises. The new ways of working driven by Lean, Agile, and DevSecOps have become all the more relevant as organizations try to transform themselves to adapt to the new normal.

But how do you really drive such a large-scale transformation in a complex and globally distributed organization? Well, today we will be sharing with you one such success story, the story of DevOps transformation at HSBC Americas.

HSBC, as we all know, is a leading global bank serving over 40 million customers across 64 countries. HSBC partnered with Infosys in this large-scale transformation. And who better to talk about this story than a leader who has led this transformation from the front, Mr. Donald Patra, the executive vice president and the chief information officer of HSBC Americas. Don heads the technology function across US, Canada, and Latin America.

Over his 25-year career, Don has played a variety of roles, starting off as an entrepreneur, then moving on to being a consultant with a Big Four consulting firm, and then going on to play various leadership roles at HSBC. Welcome, Don. Great to have you in this session.

Donald Patra

Thank you, Alok. Thanks for inviting me, and that was a fantastic and great intro. And good morning to everybody in the session. Over to you, Alok.

Alok Uniyal

Don, let me tee off this session by asking you, what are the key business drivers for the bank to undertake Agile and DevOps transformation?

Donald Patra

Yeah, sure. The way I look at it from a business driver is threefold. First of all, the market dynamics. What's happening externally with the advent of the fintechs and the Big Tech, the partnership that's happening with Big Techs and the banks. And then the fintechs starting to chip away on the profitability of the financial institutions, which is growing very rapidly. So that's one dimension of what's transpiring in the market, which is almost forcing the banks and the financial institution to be agile and nimble.

Then the second aspect that's more looking at the customers and our regulators. If you look at our customers, obviously, clearly they want fast response. Not only that, it's moving towards more they want to see us know what they want. What I mean by that is being very predictive. And we, as banks, are in a very good position with the information and data we have about our customers to leverage that, obviously, with their support, to say basically what they really want, because we can do that using, leveraging AI and machine learning.

So that's the second dimension of what's coming at us. And the third, also equally important in terms of drivers, not necessarily business drivers, but drivers, is the need of people. Because with the millennials coming in and the talents, in order to attract and retain good talent, we need to create an environment which is fast-paced, which is also an environment for learning and innovation, where people can experiment. They are empowered. They have the autonomy to create solutions for the business.

So it's a combination of all three as a driver. But then if you talk about just business drivers, it's the first two for more important part. But all three are instrumental and important. That is forcing us to be high speed and agile and nimble to be competitive in the market.

Alok Uniyal

Yeah, I think quite a complex environment in which the bank is operating, and that makes this whole transformation all the more complex. But I'm also equally aware that the bank's internal environment is also quite complex, the way you're structured and organized. So give us a sense of the kind of complexity which existed around which you actually drove this transformation in the bank.

Donald Patra

Yeah. The Americas landscape at HSBC, obviously, it's seven countries as we speak. But if you look at some of the major markets in Mexico as well as in the US, it's primarily growth through both organic and inorganic. And that adds to a bit of some of the challenges we face with the legacy portfolios that we inherit, and sometimes it's integrated, sometimes it's not integrated over the years. So that's one aspect of the challenge, or you can say, a bit of complexity that it brings.

But along with that is the geographical spread and the cultural complexity that comes with different languages, cultures across seven countries. And then you have distributed teams located in different parts of the world, along with teams in the Americas. We got about circa or a little over 6,000 technology staff in these Americas that are supporting our businesses.

We support about close to several thousand services across the jurisdictions in seven countries, supported in three data center pairs. We got a pair in Argentina and Mexico and then in US. And amidst all of this, then you have the local, regional, global construct of our organization. And then the seven lines of business and functions, three major lines of business, and then there are functions.

And then within technology, you have all the different departments, which is nothing unique, I would say. In a lot of organizations, you will have infrastructure, architecture, different departments that come together. And then, obviously, as banks and with the history that we have, we have a very hybrid technology portfolio. So you can imagine or take all of this into account. It's not trivial in terms of running a transformation of that scale and magnitude.

Alok Uniyal

Don, if I really reflect back on my experience, one of the challenges that I have seen is that most of the Agile and DevOps initiatives are initiated and led by technology, with business coming into the game quite late, and which obviously is not desirable. But I know that you were able to secure business commitment quite early on. Just wanted to understand, how did you go about it?

Donald Patra

Yeah, I think that's why we started to call it BizDevOps or BizDevSecOps, yeah. More we'll get at it, I guess, as we go on. But it has to be business-led. So we started off back in '13, when I started first with Agile in Mexico for Latin America. We started with the top of the house, with the COO and the CEO. And I recall, in the first instance, having a conversation in their office about what Agile is with the little exposure I had.

And then with partnership with Infosys, we were able to showcase what's happening in the industry, and what kind of benefits that business can potentially drive through this kind of ways of operating. So that was the first step, and that's where it first started. But again, it was very early in terms of getting real buy-in across the board in the top of the house.

So with that, we started to incubate small examples of how we can actually deploy Agile and to demonstrate some of the benefits in a smaller scale to actually prove the point. And those became our showcase, and we started to rally with that, demonstrate as to how it's done and what the benefits are. That became more apparent because they can more touch and feel.

And through that process, we used to have floor walks and have the business and the heads of the different departments, the COO come in, and even the CEO to come and look at how we are actually deploying Agile and DevSecOps. And that was quite motivating for the staff as much as it was very instrumental in trying to get the business to take ownership through what we used to call the product owners. Because we had significant challenge initially trying to get product owners involved in the day-to-day, in the pods, basically in the teams, the Agile teams or the Scrum teams.

So lead by example, showing some success stories, making sure that they have that visibility through the floor walk. So that was the other aspect that we brought in. And the other important thing we did when we actually kicked off the whole transformation, of which the Agile DevSecOps was at the heart of it, was to make it very self-funded, and make it attractive for the business and returning some of the efficiencies back for reinvestment at the discretion of the business.

And that became so we are not going and asking for money. It's rather we say, okay, if we do this, we are going to make sure that we return the benefits, and it'll be self-paid or self-funded. But on top of that, we can give you back additional saves that you can choose to redeploy or reinvest in business growth. And that became a very attractive proposition.

So making it less barrier to entry, making it very attractive for the business, showcasing what success looks like and rallying behind that to get broader ownership as much as involvement, engagement from the business.

Alok Uniyal

Yeah. I think talking about showcasing the successes, Don, I still recall one of your tech innovation days, and I happened to be there in Mexico, and you had your top IT leadership as well as business leaders actually walking the floors and the different pod teams showcasing what they had done. I think that was pretty powerful, and I could also see a clear sense of pride in your people as they were showcasing, doing a show-and-tell to all these leaders. I think that went, I think, a long way in getting the entire movement building up and securing buy-in from all quarters.

The other thing that stood out for me when you were just talking was about the self-funded model. I think, again, that can be a very compelling proposition for any organization. How do you use the gains from the transformation to fund the transformation itself? Pretty interesting.

Donald Patra

And more. That's the other thing is just not funding the transformation, but we actually saving more than what is required to be invested in transformation. So those can be-- And we have in clever ways, obviously in partnership with the business, invested those in innovation and ensuring that we do design thinking workshops on problem solving, business problems. So we reinvested those in very innovative ways to create, invest them in learning. To grow the organization, build capability of the organization. In the sense of it.

Alok Uniyal

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to just move on to the part around, so you got the business buy-in, the leadership commitment, but the other challenge which I often see is getting the alignment with your next line. With your senior management, middle management, because that's where it can come stuck. So just tell us a bit about how did you went about aligning everyone, setting up some goals and measures, and just ensuring that your next line of leadership and below that were all kind of aligned to this larger objective that you were driving.

Donald Patra

Yeah. I think the first thing I did was assess myself at the onset. So I recall having an external third party come in, and that was the first step. Later on, I landed up hiring behavioral psychologists, coming in from Infosys and with the engagement we had with Infosys to help me fix myself first. Find out, am I ready for change? Am I ready for this kind of transformation? And what are the behavioral aspects that I need to resolve?

So that was where it started, and then I encouraged my next level, the leadership, the tech leadership, in that jurisdiction in Mexico and similarly, now in US, to actually think of whether they want to follow the same. Whether they want to really understand where their strengths and opportunities are in terms of leading a large-scale transformation in DevSecOps, because it's clearly a cultural reorganization. The way you think, the way you approach different things is going to be different.

So are we ready for that as leaders ourselves, is the first step. And then from there on, obviously, once we have gone through that and understanding where our strengths and opportunities is to work together to ensure in boot camp, we used to have number of boot camps where it's to go and actually hone in on how we can improve ourselves in leading this kind of change. And where as an organization, we need to make some of this change and where the opportunities are.

With that, obviously, there are certain cadence that was put in place with regular rigor of discipline, of having regular meetings, our standup meetings, to understand how we are progressing through that change. And that's quite important is when the rest of the organization sees that the top of the house and the leaders are actually taking this in such a serious way, where they're regularly on our daily stand-ups, they're taking stock of how much more progress we have made, then it becomes quite apparent. The tone from the top is quite obvious for the rest of the organization.

And through this process, obviously, we came up with very interesting measures and metrics. We leveraged gamification at the onset, and that was an interesting learning there, because gamification worked very well when we started to create healthy competition at the onset. But later on, we found that was not being very effective, because people started to compete with each other rather than getting ahead themselves and competing with themselves.

So, yeah. So it's a combination of measurements, having a very metrics-oriented kind of approach, with regular cadence and rigor surrounding how we are progressing, but also having a very concerted and conscious effort of changing each of us in the leadership layer in ensuring that we are equipped ourselves to drive a change of this magnitude.

Alok Uniyal

Yeah, and talking about the measures and metrics, you mentioned that you adopted a highly metrics-oriented approach. I still recall these TV screens on your floors showing live feed of how the different parts were doing. You talked about gamification. There was live metrics being shown and very powerful information radiator, which brings everybody on the same page with regards to the performance.

And what also struck me was that you actually had that screen in your office as well, where you actually had a live view of how the teams were performing. But I thought that was pretty powerful because as a leader, you yourself was kind of tracking this almost on an ongoing basis.

Now, I'm also kind of cognizant of the fact that when you're trying to change the ways of working, it's not just about introducing the practices and tooling, it's also about changing structures. Your team structures, organization structures. I know that you brought in this pod kind of a model, and that's also evolving. Can you just talk a bit about what are some of these changes that you introduced as part of this transformation?

Donald Patra

Yeah. We put together teams surrounding products. So for example, in the banking industry, we have cards as a product. So we started off that way where we, lending as a product, core banking as a product. So we had put teams who are self-contained, all aspects of technology and the business owner all sitting together in what we call pod or scrums.

Now, in that kind of model, you kind of break the siloed structure that the organization typically runs in. So they all have a common goal of delivering outcomes or business feature set for that particular product. And they are empowered, they have all the tools, they have the funding, and they're making decisions. Less time spent on handoffs and handouts, and they're just delivering outcomes.

So I think that was the first structural. Now, in that context, they're obviously moving from a traditional structure into a pod structure brings in a lot of challenges in terms of scalability. For example, we had 40 pods in one jurisdiction, like in Mexico, similar number in US. You don't have that many, for example, DBAs or solution architects that can be allocated to every 40 pods, right? So how do you pool them, have them in a centralized practice model, but then they're named individuals allocated to X number of pods, right? So they're still responsible, they have accountability for this number of pods.

So we came through all those kind of different models to make it work in our context without adding cost to the whole system, right? So that's one structural, and then very quickly, we started to encounter challenges in terms of prioritization, which was a huge learning again, where we figured that in each of the pods, the business driver is more about revenue and putting things out in the market, which rightfully so. That's what we are incentivized to do.

But at the same time, things that are important as production fixes or cyber-related issues that need to be fixed or regulatory was not getting priority. So we came up with a prioritization matrix. At the top again, it was agreed at the bank level that this is how we are going to prioritize at every individual pod.

Once we sorted that and then people was clear, along with the business owner in the pod, they were very clear in terms of priorities, then we ran into these challenges of cross-pod prioritization, which is basically cross-product and there is no single-- We had scrums of scrums, which we used to call product council, but necessarily, there was no arbitrator who can make a call that, at a bank level, which one should take priority.

So we went through that kind of journey, a challenge for a little while till we got to the SAFe. And we are still evolving in that journey, but with the SAFe, we are able to, through the PI, the program increment planning, we are able to bring teams across the organization, and the necessary support to make those priority calls.

So mobilizing and moving in that direction to drive customer outcome, we have actually got into that kind of model where we are able to get through the priorities when it has cross line of business or cross product, competing demands, so to speak. Yeah. And resolution of that.

Alok Uniyal

Tell us a bit about what kind of business value were you able to actually realize out of this transformation?

Donald Patra

Yeah, I think it's kind of a bit of a rollercoaster initially, where we thought we were making progress, then we started to retract. So we ran through numerous routes and numerous learnings, starting from we had to redefine every individual's roles and responsibilities, because there was lack of that clarity surrounding that. So we went through different phases of maturity, and sometimes we felt that we were going backwards.

But most important through that journey is always we started and one of the things that I was always concerned with, how to make it sticky, how to make it sustainable, right? Very important, right? And in doing so, making sure that we have-- And that's why the culture shift and the culture change was so fundamental. Because if you don't address that, it's not about just bunch of tools and slapping in a process. It's about people's mindset. That's where it fundamentally--

So once we got some of those going, it was kind of interesting to see the business value. There are two dimensions. One is direct business value. Like for example, in Mexico, I recall back in '18 in the card space, obviously, we came up with a brand new digital channel to improve market share, and it went up quite dramatically in that market, right? I recall that we sold in one single month, the sales jumped from the previous month to the next month almost north of 60%, right?

So there are obviously measures and metrics that we used to collect, and a lot of that was to do with how fast we were delivering feature sets to the market at a higher quality. One recent one with the pandemic, it's interesting, which is the Paycheck Protection Program in the US. The teams were able to deliver in few days, processing over 4,000 loans. They delivered a solution that can process 4,000 loans with $1.3 billion, which earlier we would have taken much longer time to do something like this, right?

So this kind, and it was quite timely that in the US specifically, that we embarked on this about 18 months back, and with Infosys again in partnership. And it has been quite an enriching journey thus far to deliver something like this at the right time when the pandemic hit us, right? And then that's kind of pure direct business benefit.

But when I look at my technology measures, like my mean time to recover when the production incident happens, how quickly we are able to recover, and we've clearly seen uptick of 70%, north of 70% improvements year on year as a result of DevSecOps and bringing agility. Release frequency has gone up 50%. It's just the beginning, I'll tell you. It'll go much faster as we mature in that whole journey.

The disruptive changes when we do over 1,000 changes almost every week in production these days, and we have practically less than 0.02% disruptions as a result of this change. And most of the time, it's zero week after week. So these are obviously not direct customer benefits, but these are clearly things that business do appreciate, and these are the things that when you showcase to the business, it creates that credibility and the strength in driving with force and rejuvenates the team and excites them to drive the change that we are looking for.

Alok Uniyal

Yeah, certainly, I think it's been a great partnership, I would say, between HSBC and Infosys, as we went about this transformation journey. And this conversation has been very engaging, Don, and I'm sure we could have gone for another hour or so, but I'm also cognizant of the time.

So let me wrap this up by asking you to share with our audience and with your peers who are on similar journeys or planning to take a journey on this front, what would be your advice to them if you just reflect back on your own personal experience?

Donald Patra

I think it very well leads to what I just talked about. One of the key things is when we look at DevSecOps, one of the learnings that we had is we cannot look at it in isolation, because it's a part of a broader transformation that needs to be, whether we call it digital transformation, or technology transformation, however you want to put it.

Yes, DevSecOps or BizDevOps is one aspect of it, but you need to also encapsulate how we are going to change the mindset, the people and culture dimension of that, along with building innovation and experimental kind of environment where people can come and try different things.

One of the things in that is also about sustenance. It's also important to keep in mind how do you change the fabric of the culture? And every thread in that fabric has to vibrate at the same frequency as to where you want the organization to be. So the top of the house might, the CxOs and the executive committees might want a direction where we travel. But you need to get the rest of the organization in that same path, and there is a huge cultural dimension and hence, the ability to sustain that.

If the cultural change doesn't happen, it's not going to be sticky, right? So in that context, building that or focusing on the people aspect is very key to make sure that people are coming along. You'll always have that last third that will be the laggards and we need to make some hard decisions and tough choices on those. But for the most part, you will get people to come along and create an exciting journey for the company and our staff.

And the last but not the least is always capitalize on small incremental success and as we go, because this journey, this kind of transformation is not going to be easy and seamless. It can be overwhelming. It will be challenging at times. But keeping that momentum, keeping that excitement, building on successes as we move along and reinforcing, rejuvenating, reinventing sometimes is very, very important. And communication through that process with the staff, with the top management, bringing everybody together along with the business is very key in that journey.

Alok Uniyal

No, I think this has been a great conversation, Don. So thanks once again for sharing these insights and your own personal experiences, which I think will be very valuable for our audience. So thanks a lot for making time available for this conversation. It was great talking to you and wish you the very best as you continue to move forward on this journey.

Donald Patra

Thank you very much, Alok. Thanks for inviting me again.

Alok Uniyal

Thank you.