First Derivatives were engaged by LCH to manage the ongoing support and development of their in-house Fixed Income Back Office Platform to enable the existing team to focus on the roll out of its replacement vendor system calypso. FD proposed to take on the first augment the support and development teams onsite before moving some functions to the company’s nearshore HQ.
Problem
- Aggressive timelines to take over sole ownership of Production support.
- Integrate with and replace current support team provided by TCS.
- 24/7 follow-the-sun support model including overnight and on-call escalation services.
- Hybrid service model to transition support to a near shore solution over time and other client sites in Paris, New York and Sydney.
- Support documentation in most areas was virtually non-existent.
- Lack of understanding of calypso application from the client’s user base due to new implementation.
What we did
Planning & Preparation
- Review existing application and SLA documentation.
- Evaluate complexity and estimate support transition effort.
- Define support model.
- Finalise contractual agreement and SLAs
Knowledge Transfer
- Ramped up onsite resources to fast track knowledge transfer phase.
- Shadowed the incumbent support and development team and documented process.
- Following a successful parallel run phase client resource started to roll off the support and development teams.
Live Service
- After 3 months all the client resources had been fully rolled off the support team onto the new implementation project.
- First Derivative began to successfully transition to a hybrid onsite/near-shore model.
- Managed in-house support and dev function to end migration and decommission legacy system.
Continuous Improvements
- Application support team now consists of 9 First Derivative employees under a follow the sun 24*7 support model situated from 5 global locations including Sydney, London, Newry, Paris and New York.
- This team provides support for 20 separate instances of Calypso across Prod, Member Test, PreProd, Test and Development Environments.
- LCH continue to employ First Derivative employees within App Support, Dev, QA and BA teams.
Results
- Calypso support team split between client site and First Derivative’s near shore facility as part of a follow-the-sun 24/7 support model.
- Onsite training for inexperienced users and documentation improved across all areas.
- Continuous review and improvement of performance and capacity of core Calypso application.
- Expansion of support services into downstream Collateral Management system.
- Regular MIS reporting within daily, weekly and monthly packs.
Benefits
- Client was able to achieve their aggressive timeline to fully transition support and development functions to an outsource partner.
- First Derivative were able to reduce the need to train any in-house resources on a system decommission.
- Significant cost benefit were realized by the client for the duration of the support and dev contract through our near-shore offering.
- Support and dev team were able to support the implementation team during the final migration phase.
- Experience of Support and dev team were retained by the client following the successful implementation of Calypso.