Business Chief USA February 2019

NATIONWIDE
146
its use of Agile substantially in 2011,
so it employed Lean techniques to
achieve this. Harking back to the early
days of industrialization, Nationwide
adopted the idea of a so-called “software
development factory” complete with
development teams that would finish one
step needed to create code. Establishing
clearly defined key roles for each development
team (such as scrum master,
tech lead, requirements lead and test
lead) enabled the replication of best
practices across the enterprise, as if it
were a factory. The insurer also implemented
a visual management system,
allowing developers to gain information
on the shop floor quickly, as well as
Gemba Walks – a fundamental Lean
management philosophy. “Gemba Walks
enables leaders to visit the shop floor
and to see first-hand the issues teams
are facing,” notes Vasudeva. “It allows
information to flow from frontline teams
to senior management in real time.
Leaders also become more enmeshed
within the workings of the factory instead
of managing it in a spreadsheet or a
dashboard.” Wanting to scale this even
further, Nationwide also showed that
these cutting-edge methodologies
$28bn
in operating
revenue
1926
Year founded
32,000
Approximate number
of employees
could be used not only for computer
programming languages like Java
but could also be applied to Cobol,
Packages and ETL code.
This mammoth investment, Vasudeva
says, was starting to pay off. By 2014,
Nationwide’s Agile development teams
had proven better quality and better
productivity using industry benchmarks,
and it had also created up to 50 development
teams. However, Agile methodol-
FEBRUARY 2019