CASE STUDY: Shaping the Testing Capability of a Global Financial Services Organisation

Industry/business type: Financial Services 

No of employees: 1000+

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.

SITUATION

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 reviewed the performance of its IT service providers and decided to recover the in-house testing service.

This will allow them to adopt agile development techniques and significantly accelerate the time taken to get new products and services into the market.

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 operated 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. 

OUR SOLUTION AND APPROACH

After conducting a full review, Corecom Technology Academy (CTA) took a combined holistic approach in liaison with Corecom Consulting, analysing the client’s specific needs and objectives and designing a tailored solution to address the immediate needs of the client. This including executing a strategy for branded, targeted, and digital recruitment campaigns that successfully attracted and secured high-quality employees needed to drive the client’s business initiatives forward.

To ensure this service was effective and sustainable, our client needed to look at medium and long term solutions — this was where CTA stepped in. Our role was to provide ongoing support by developing a structured training programme for the new hires and existing staff to ensure the client’s team could meet challenges with the latest technology skills and industry knowledge.

Corecom Technology Academy training programmes are key to establishing a diverse and sustainable workforce that aligns with client needs and drives adaptability within constantly evolving tech markets.

  • ENABLE

    Corecom Consulting helped the client deliver their plan by running targeted digital recruitment campaigns to secure permanent staff. This included hiring a Head of Testing, Test Managers, and expert test contractors with strong industry experience in Automation and Performance Engineering. Test Leads and Managers were also provided during project peaks.

  • GROW

    Corecom Technology Academy (CTA) played a key role by recruiting, training, and mentoring technology professionals, including university graduates and career changers. The CTA training program helped professionals develop the latest technical and soft skills, empowering them to grow their capabilities and seamlessly integrate into the client's existing teams.

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%. Through collaborative working, we were able to:

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

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

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

"We needed a partner who could help us define our vision for QA and testing and then implement a roadmap over the short, medium and long term to deliver this vision. By working with the Corecom Group we had access to experts who could help us along every step of the journey - from designing the target operating model, through selection of key candidates and onto developing our own strategic delivery capability."

IT Delivery Director