Benefits of a cross-functional organization structure in AMS
Spotlight:
The way banks organize their IT teams are fast transforming. Traditionally, Application development and Operations teams are organized in silos with clear responsibilities around development and support activities (further classified between Infrastructure and applications). This segregation leads to disconnected teams with different priorities, inefficiencies, slow response times, and bad customer experiences.
Creating a cross functional team for managing changes and operations has got its own benefit. According to a study from McKinsey, with cross-functional teams managing development, support, and operations, we can resolve technical issues 30% faster, ensuring minimal disruption and a more seamless customer experience.
A cross-functional model is an autonomous self-sustaining model with capabilities from multiple disciplines organized for every value stream that matters to business. These teams will have roles with clear segregation of duties, coming together to handle operational issues, reliability/ availability issues, changes to be addressed in systems running in production environment. They collaborate heavily with a dedicated development teams that work on long term/ futuristic feature additions and large transformation programs.
Cross Functional Business-first AMS Model
Cross-functional organizations, eliminate the inefficiencies of multiple handoff that result in productivity lapses impacting end customer satisfaction. Cross functional organizations seamlessly integrate the engineering skills in the operations teams, thereby ensuring not only the reliability and availability of the platform but also significantly reducing the lead time for critical issues. Availability of moder observability solutions deliver right insight about the topography while Introduction of AI, accelerates the speed of delivery. This whole chain come together effectively to make sure that the business is able to focus on what matters to them, and measure them effectively, instead about worrying about the system efficiency.
For ex:- lead time reduction in loan disbursal and hence increase in customer satisfaction could be an important metric that matter to a bank. When the Engineering and Operations work collaboratively in ensuring this happens, the business KPI becomes completely traceable to the engineering and operation metric that can help in achieving significant result around the KPI.
Best Practices:
To successfully implement a unified AMS model, consider these best practices:
- Cross-Functional Teams: Factor Engineering, tooling and Functional skills as part of the team in addition to the traditional operations skill.
- Integrate SRE into Production: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) should be an integral part of the production support teams.
- Focus on Business Metrics: Tracking technical metrics as the reflection of the operational efficiency could lead to “watermelon effect” trap. Track KPIs that matter to the business and establish clear traceability of these metrices to IT systems.
- Leveraging AI and Machine Learning for Optimization: Adopt AIOps as a means for optimizing operations and create ML models that can learn from historical data and make meaningful insights on the situation.
- Create Innovation Councils: Create joint innovation councils for democratising the process of idea generation and implementation. Reward top ideas that make tangible impact to business.
Closing Thoughts:
As the landscape of AMS continues to shift, businesses must adapt to stay competitive. Moving from a siloed approach to a unified cross functional organization structure focused on business outcomes will not only improve operational efficiency but will also create more value for customers and stakeholders alike.
With 25 years of expertise in BankTech, Maveric has been at the forefront of driving transformative solutions in the banking domain.
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