Agile Meets the Real World

Jeanne joined UBS in 2019 and heads Digital Strategy and Products UBS Wealth Management USA. In this key role, Jeanne is responsible for designing and executing the holistic digital strategy for the Wealth Management business in the Americas, including the delivery of a state-of-the-art digital financial advisor & client experience across all business touch points and aligning business strategy to the overarching global digital capabilities.

Jeanne has 25⁺ years of experience leading business and technology teams focused on strategic projects & platforms in financial services. Prior to joining UBS, she served as the Head of Project Management for E-Trade and spent 12 years at Morgan Stanley, where she held a series of leadership positions including leading the field and client technology teams, technology training, banking and capital markets.  Jeanne has a BA in Economics from the State University of NY at Albany and an MBA from Iona College. Jeanne lives in Westchester county New York with her husband and 2 children.

John Burke is CTO with Nemertes Research. He conducts and analyzes primary research in, and advises key enterprise and vendor clients on, hybrid cloud, software-defined networking including SD-WAN, automation, and DevOps. As a research analyst and consultant, he draws on his 30 years of experience as a practitioner and leader in IT to better understand the needs of IT executives and the challenges facing vendors trying to sell to them. His experience has given him broad and deep knowledge in computing, communications, and IT management. Mr. Burke holds an MA in the history of science and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, both from The Johns Hopkins University. His interests include baking, birding, and beer.

Most organizations don’t go all-in on agile methodology — they restrict it to application development (and sometimes not even all of that), or adopt only a couple basic principles in their effort to accelerate solution development. How do the parts doing Agile fit in with the rest of the organization? Very carefully! We’ll look at some of the significant challenges beyond basic workflow.

John has been a part of delivering great software for a variety of organizations for longer than he cares to admit. Whether it is helping guide large organizations on complex transformations or helping companies embrace software as a key differentiator, John finds great enjoyment in that satisfying “aha moment”. In his current capacity at OutSystems, he and his team help customers connect the need to build software with the capability of doing it at scale.

Marie Giangrande leads the go-to-market strategy for OutSystems in the Financial Services Marketplace. OutSystems provides a full-stack low-code development platform with built-in DevOps and SecOps capabilities uniquely suited for designing and delivering digital financial services.

Focused on strategic transformation, Marie shares the best practices of banks, capital markets, and investment firms that are building tech-first capabilities for Mobile Finance, Digital Service Delivery, Operational Risk Management, and Compliance Automation.

Michael Reynolds is the Business Technology Senior Manager for Service Digitization responsible for two Robotic Process Automation platforms, Automation Anywhere and UiPath as well as the exploration and adoption of the Enterprise Low Code platform, Outsystems. Mike’s teams operate under Agile principles and have delivered over 250 automated processes since 2019 coupled with another 4 Outsystems Applications and many more in progress. The digital workforce executes the equivalent of 400 employees worth of work every day and continues to expand at a rate of 10 new processes every month.

How are firms adopting an agile operating model for DevOps and SecOps mandates? What obstacles have been encountered trying to achieve near-real-time service delivery? During this session, we will review how financial firms are uniting design, code, and services deployment. We will walk through the journey of 2 firms to identify the typical ‘stall’ points of digitizing service delivery.

Takeaways:

• Achieving the target operating profile of a ‘tech-first’ firm
• Understanding agile operating needs, DevOps and SecOps mandates
• Overcoming technology hurdles and the developer talent gap
• Moving talent from operations to software engineering
• Standing up a Center of Excellence for Digital Service Delivery

Prabhu is a Vice President – Engineering responsible for Agile, SDLC Automation & Resilience for Virtusa NA Banking division. He brings 18+ years of experience working across different enterprise banking platforms across Retail, Trade lifecycle products, Risk & Commercial verticals. Partnering across Virtusa’s banking customer space build solutions to reduce inefficiencies with non-value time, improve inherent resilience of modernization programs & SDLC automation levers. He also architects and builds accelerators tailored for Virtusa Banking customers.

How do financial firms handle large cross platform backlogs and measure success ? What has been our tweaks to process , development approach and team composition. How our learnings have evolved over the past 24 months based on multiple agile journeys of both change the bank digital initiatives and run the bank tech debt and optimization initiatives.

Key take aways

1. How team compositions have played a role in lean development
2. How to improve reliability in an increasingly cloud/cloud native ecosystem
3. Measuring success across output and outcome dimensions

Damon Edwards is Senior Director, Product at PagerDuty. Previously, Damon was a Co-Founder of Rundeck, the makers of the popular open source runbook automation platform acquired by PagerDuty in 2020. Prior to Rundeck, Damon was the Managing Partner of DTO Solutions, a DevOps and Operations Improvement Consultancy. Damon has spent the past 22 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT Operations. He is noted for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large-scale enterprise organizations. Damon is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps, SRE, and Operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.

“Responding to change over following a plan” is literally a line from the Agile Manifesto. But even after years of Agile focus, so many development organizations are struggling with capacity, cost, and quality issues all due to unplanned operations work. Now, with the rise of “you build it, you run it” models, things are only poised to get worse. In this talk, Damon Edwards will look at the problem of unplanned work and what some high-performing organizations are doing about it.

Join us for a discussion of the real benefits of an agile model, and of the kinds of modifications financial services firms make to the generic version of agile in order to reap the greatest benefits in their own operational, legal, regulatory, and industry contexts. 

John Burke is CTO with Nemertes Research. He conducts and analyzes primary research in, and advises key enterprise and vendor clients on, hybrid cloud, software-defined networking including SD-WAN, automation, and DevOps. As a research analyst and consultant, he draws on his 30 years of experience as a practitioner and leader in IT to better understand the needs of IT executives and the challenges facing vendors trying to sell to them. His experience has given him broad and deep knowledge in computing, communications, and IT management. Mr. Burke holds an MA in the history of science and a bachelor of science in electrical engineering, both from The Johns Hopkins University. His interests include baking, birding, and beer.

Raja Chris is a Director and Head of IT Infrastructure at Annaly Capital management, a diversified capital manager that invests in and finances residential and commercial assets with over $125 billion in their portfolio. At Annaly, Raja is responsible for the design and delivery of next generation products, cloud providers, services, technologies and IT functions critical to achieving Annaly’s strategic growth priorities. He provides leadership for the continued development of an innovative, robust, and secure information technology environment throughout the Company.

“The WSTA’s diverse membership puts it in a unique position to share knowledge with and educate technology professionals regarding current challenges, solutions, and future directions for the industry,” says Raja. “Being part of the WSTA has offered me the unique opportunity to provide members with an education and knowledge sharing platform designed to drive industry-wide changes in future technology, such as Blockchain, CICD, AI, RPA, and Cybersecurity, etc.”

Raja has spent over 20 years engineering solutions and overseeing technology teams in the financial services industry. He has guided global, matrix, and cross-functional teams in IT architecture design, development, and implementation for improved infrastructure stability, performance, and team productivity. His leadership approach is to partner with business leaders and his IT team to drive innovation and use technology as a strategic lever in achieving aggressive growth targets and his vision.

Before joining Annaly, Raja was Head of Engineering and Operations at Nomura Security and led implementation of strategic enterprise architecture methodologies and ensured all processes aligned with corporate technology roadmaps and best practices; established solid systems and policies to enforce architectural review and identified requirements based on company business goals. Prior to that, Raja held various senior roles at SAC Capital, and Citi Group. Raja is currently a WSTA Board Member and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. You can contact Raja via LinkedIn or email him directly at rchris@annaly.com

Keri McKiernan is the Head of Commercial & Marketing Technology where she is responsible for overseeing these technology platforms across S&P Global.

She is an accomplished leader in the Cloud Applications and CRM Space with over 15 years of experience leading large teams and delivering complex, high value projects in business applications and Financial Services.  She has deep expertise in areas such as Salesforce, Analytics, Websites, Marketing Automation, ServiceNow, Scaled Agile and Project Management.

 Keri received her MBA, MS in Project and Program Management from Brandeis University and her BS in Management Information Systems from CalPoly SLO. 

Manoj is a Managing Director at Deloitte Consulting LLP and brings 20+ years of experience advising senior Technology executives in the areas of innovation, strategy and Enterprise agility. Manoj has deep expertise in the areas of building hyper performing teams and has set up global Technology CoE’s from the ground up.

Manoj has also advised clients on Enterprise Automation strategy, Automation CoE set up and leveraging Automation to dramatically reduce Software development cost. He serves clients in the Financial Services, Insurance, Technology  and Life Sciences industry segments.

Manoj leads Deloitte’s Agile and DevOps practice for the US firm and is the Executive sponsor for the Agile DevOps Excellence Hub in Deloitte.

Sean is the head of JP Morgan Asset Management coaching where he is responsible for optimizing coaching capacity, defining and implementing the scaled agile operating model, and adopting OKRs across JPMC Asset & Wealth Management. 

Sean has experience leading large-scale agile transformations, coaching at all organizational altitudes, leading agile portfolio management, and delivering innovative products to market through product management.  In 2014, he took 1^st place in Fidelity Investments’ first-ever mobile hackathon then brought the idea to market as a product that paved the way for Fidelity’s your account product offering. 

Sean holds an MBA from Jersey City University and a bachelor’s in Computer Science from Penn State University.  He holds many agile certifications from the Scrum Alliance, Scrum Inc., and Agility Health. Sean is a continuous learner and enjoys reading books about leadership, technology, and finance, with a fiction book always in the mix.