About Raiffeisen Bank International
Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI) regards Austria and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as its home market. 15 markets of the region are covered by subsidiary banks, additionally the Group comprises numerous other financial service providers, for instance in the fields of leasing, asset management and mergers and acquisitions. In total, around 58,000 employees service about 14.6 million customers through more than 3,000 business outlets, the great majority of which are located in CEE. RBI is a fully-consolidated subsidiary of Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG (RZB). RZB indirectly owns around 60.7 per cent of the common stock, the remainder is in free float. RBI’s shares are listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange. In 2010, Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI) hired ByteSource to increase the capacity for the roll-out of our retail risk management platform but also to add creativity for solving existing and upcoming issues. After the initial phase, ByteSource quickly became an important part of the project team. Their competence in the area of professional software development and operations combined with the ability to provide problem solutions within a short time-frame enabled RBI to introduce agile development methods. ByteSource proved to be a reliable partner providing transparent results as required by the project management. We see in ByteSource a strong partner, also for future projects.
Project description
The overall project goal was the introduction of a risk management platform for RBI’s subsidiaries in Central and Eastern Europe based on SAS. The magnitude of the project led to high complexities and in 2010, it was required to change the traditional way of managing this project.
The change was done in two Phases:
Phase 1: Reduce HW cost and enable agile development practices Phase 2: Use agile development practices for platform improvements and rollouts
Phase 1 included an automated installation procedure for all stages of servers – development, test and production. Furthermore also designing and providing of an infrastructure covering all development phases for SAS projects, fast provisioning of Linux based development servers, revision management, continuous integration, automated tests and other technologies well known in non-SAS environments.
Phase 2 initiated the migration of the project approach towards agile practices.
After finishing 20 iterations not only the project KPIs spoke a clear language but the feedback from the most important stakeholders, the users of the system, became more and more enthusiastic.
