BST Awards 2019: Best use of the Agile methodology—JP Morgan Wealth Management

JP Morgan Wealth Management’s (WM’s) efforts to provide value quicker and reduce delivery times for the development of the mobile version of its Connect Advisor platform has secured its win in the best use of the Agile methodology category at this year’s BST Awards.

The Connect desktop platform comprises sales, management, performance reporting, and brokerage trading and client services.

JP Morgan’s WM arm utilized Pivotal Labs, a software development service provided by San Francisco-based Pivotal Software, to help build the mobile application and offer training on cloud-native Agile development and how to use technologies such as Apple’s iOS. 

The development group comprised 10 people: five from JP Morgan’s IT team and five from Pivotal Labs. All members worked together in Pivotal Labs’ “Silicon Alley” offices for four out of the seven months of the project cycle, immersing themselves in Agile practices.

Individuals were assigned to one of the three focus groups: design, product management, and engineering. The design group shared prototypes and held meetings with users every three weeks to establish trust in the product and promote client feedback.

The lean-product management group used both quantitative prioritization exercises (for example OptimalSort) and qualitative interviews to achieve a prioritized backlog and make adjustments to the project roadmap when necessary. The engineering team learned extreme programming techniques and built a continuous delivery pipeline that allowed it to respond quickly to customer requirements and include practices such as automated testing and faster code deployment.

“When we do product engineering, we want to be disciplined and [be able] to leverage user research to start off our development cycles,” says Navi Sirisena, head of CRM technology at JP Morgan WM. “Additionally, we want to be able to deliver continuously with high velocity and high quality.”

At the end of the project cycle, the collaboration with Pivotal Labs enabled JP Morgan WM to achieve 20 software releases within seven months.