Worldpay embraces bimodal development to speed time to market and
motivate employees
A pioneer in payments processing
technology and solutions for merchant customers, Worldpay processes
over 40 billion transactions annually through more than 300 payment
types across 146 countries and 126 currencies. Technology forms the
backbone of Worldpay’s business, with 40% of the company’s employees
worldwide focusing on the development of proprietary technology
platforms and fintech services to enable merchants to accept a vast
array of payment types, across multiple channels, anywhere in the world.
Historically, software development at Worldpay employed a
”waterfall” approach typical of a project management office (PMO).
However, Jason Scott-Taggart, Head of Technology Operations, had big
ambitions to embrace bimodal development to accelerate time to market
for new services and create a more motivational role for software developers.
Jason explains: “We had a clear vision to move to a bimodal
ecosystem that could accommodate our traditional, more predictable
‘waterfall’ approach to software development, while allowing our teams
to experiment and develop in an Agile, iterative way.”
He adds: “Software developers are driven by innovation, not process.
With such a large percentage of our workforce engaged in development,
motivation and satisfaction of the team was also a key driver.”
With ServiceNow Worldpay facilitates company-wide adoption of
DevOps practices
Jason set about redesigning the
organisation around a service-oriented, capabilities-focused model,
where DevOps practices would be embedded at the core. Rather than
focusing on teams with a common skillset, Worldpay trialled
cross-functional teams.
The approach required a fundamental shift in thinking around the
people and processes for run/support. Jason explains: “We wanted to
empower our DevOps teams to focus on the development of new services,
but to achieve this we had to move support out of our technical
services teams. Ultimately, we wanted to put the right skills in the
right teams that would get the fix closer to the user.”
Using ServiceNow®, Worldpay
created an organisation-wide platform to redesign the delivery of
run/support, so the focus of the customer experience sits at the first
level of support, backed up by Level 2. In this way, DevOps teams
receive only the feedback specific to the micro capabilities they are
focused on, which form the building blocks of more comprehensive
business services for Worldpay merchants and customers.
Today, 70% of run/support sits with the first line team, which is
accountable for the customer experience, and 20% sits within specific
business services. Any problem tickets or requests can be triggered to
be sent to the JIRA software development stack, helping to ensure
DevOps only receives links to real incidents and not brain dumps from individuals.
The result is that only 5% of support now sits with the DevOps
teams, where that level is manageable and specific to the technical
service for which they are accountable. At the same time, the DevOps
teams are given meaningful feedback on the Level 1 support experience
from ServiceNow through to their stacks in JIRA.
ServiceNow helps Worldpay break down monolithic artefacts to drive
Agile development
The adoption of ServiceNow also created
the ideal framework to drive a DevOps culture within Worldpay,
delivering on its vision to break down the monolithic artefacts and
checkpoints to empower more Agile development.
For Jason the driver was clear: “It was hard to store everything up
in the development process. Teams were doing two-weekly sprints, but
we needed a way to size, touch it, change it, and automate the release
process and delivery of those packages.”
Today, more than half of Worldpay’s development team uses Agile
methodology, underpinned by ServiceNow. The platform supplements with
automation and monitoring at every stage, from software construction
to deployment, with seamless integration with Worldpay’s JIRA software
development tool.
The service acceptance criteria, which Jason calls a huge
spreadsheet, has moved as a workflow into ServiceNow, alongside
knowledge articles, dependencies with other services, and mapping with
configuration items in the CMDB.
ServiceNow enables shorter development cycles, more dependable
releases, and increased deployment frequency
For Jason,
the benefits are notable, with the DevOps culture driving operational
efficiency and accelerating time to market for new services to meet
customer demands. New requirements are also fed back to development
teams more quickly for prioritisation.
“We wanted to automate and devolve, and ServiceNow has enabled us to
start the move to DevOps,” says Jason. “The result is shorter
development cycles, more dependable releases, and increased deployment
frequency. Delivery to customers is faster and more predictable—and I
get more control, not less.”
The impact of the restructuring and DevOps approach driven by
ServiceNow was evident following an initial pilot that tasked a small
Worldpay DevOps team with creating specific micro services around
payments. Just three tickets a week are now filtering down to the team
of eight.
Critically, Jason says the focus on DevOps has freed up his teams to
work the way they want to work: “We see high satisfaction from
development staff when they have ‘skin in the game’. They’re motivated
as they see the benefits of their efforts more immediately, and being
‘on the hook’ is a challenge they relish.”
ServiceNow helps Worldpay engineer cultural change at scale
While the traditional waterfall approach continues for major,
PMO-style projects at Worldpay, Jason says the next step is to move
DevOps into large-scale operations: “We’re now looking for a big
cultural change—and that becomes harder to orchestrate.”
However, Jason is determined: “Our vision of software development is
only possible if we can achieve it at scale."
