Case Study: Meet the Pensions Powerhouse Revolutionizing with PopUp Mainframe

Legal & General is one of the UK’s leading financial services groups and a major global investor. In the past decade alone, their business has witnessed a 20x surge in pension books in a decade, as the industry faced huge regulatory challenges and a digital marketplace whose expectations were ever increasing.

Facing that change, they decided they needed to evolve fast, without losing the value they already delivered. How? They innovated from within, a concept dubbed “hollowing the core”, simplifying the system while adapting to the evolving digital landscape.

The challenge?

Keeping up with regulatory shifts while catering to a new breed of tech-savvy, app-driven customers – who want their pensions at the speed of a voice command – was a pressing concern. Their biggest hurdle to achieving their ambitious goals was a lack of available mainframe environments in which to innovate. Stringent rules on machine availability had become a bottleneck in their aim to deliver new services faster.

A People First Approach

As fundamental as their challenge was, the solution was equally straightforward: why not provide ‘instant access’ to mainframe resources to match the team’s innovation requirements?

And that’s what they did. With PopUp Mainframe in combination with Delphix, they were able to establish virtual mainframe environments, available on-demand, for dev, testing, and R&D. With instant access to mainframe time, teams embraced the ability to install apps and appropriately masked data subsets, and enjoy full control in their PopUps, sending productivity through the roof.

Embracing PopUp Mainframe and product engineering principles, L&G turbocharged their mainframe SDLC, ensuring faster, quality changes.

Enter empathy-based design: a game-changer

It wasn’t a traditional project; it was a continuous loop of understanding, ideation, prototyping, and relentless user feedback. They waved goodbye to the hero culture, instead, focusing on understanding pain points and mapping out a service design blueprint.

PopUpMainframe was a key ingredient to empathy-based design. It provided the adaptable, always-available z/OS environments the team needed to adopt new ways of working and continuously evolve based on feedback.

Revamping their strategy was essential. They navigated the transition by working closely with their team, redefining tools, environments, data, and, most importantly, the culture.

And the technical strides? Monumental.

Leveraging PopUpMainframe in Azure, they shifted their mainframe environments to the cloud—5 million lines of code, 80,000 modules, all seamlessly transported without changing code or config. They didn’t just move; they transformed, harmonizing their GitHub and Endevor repositories, bridging old and new in perfect sync. From COBOL to Python, green screens to GUIs, and legacy systems to cutting-edge tech, they mastered it all.

Measurable Outcomes

The renewed environment was a modernized Software Development Lifecycle with PopUpMainframe at the core, laptops loaded with contemporary tools. The recorded results were transformative – based on a production-to-dev turnaround in hours, rather than days – as exemplified by L&G’s own reporting categories.

Quickness

Data creation lead time – 5 minutes (was previously a ‘few weeks’)
Environment creation lead time – 30 minutes (was previously 6 months)
Cycle time (features) – 92 days (was previously 355 days)

Quantity

Release cadence – weekly (was previously monthly)
Throughput – 50 releases a year (was previously 10)
Automation – 100% Unit Test coverage

Quality

Incidents –zero reported incidents year to date
Downtime –zero hours per month
Incident recovery (MTTR) – 308% improvement

For an explanation of the results, L&G described the outcomes in a recent webinar, recorded with PopUp Mainframe plus delivery partners Kyndryl and Delphix.

The project not only achieved great operational results but enhanced the experience of those working on it. The team testimonials say it all. Angela, once confined to green screens, now revels in an IDEs which are game-changing. Raghav, a mainframe stalwart for 16 years, never imagined running COBOL programs outside the mainframe until this revolution unfolded.From empathetic redesign to technical metamorphosis, this journey redefined their approach, empowering them to transform the unchangeable, making the impossible possible.The achievements are a testament to daring innovation and relentless adaptability in a landscape hungry for evolution.

Looking Ahead

Of course, evolution doesn’t stop. L&G’s operational teams are looking at how this renewed environment can be leveraged to support their important sustainability program. More efficient use of resources and a lower overall carbon footprint looks set to reduce their power and emissions needs for core IT services, another crucially positive impact of this transformational project.

Recognition

The team’s excellent work has been recognised across the industry.

Environmental honouree at 2024 European Impact Awards by SustainableIT.org

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