IET Customer Profile
Kleinwort Benson Investment Management
Kleinwort Benson Investment Management (KBIM) is part of the Dresdner Kleinwort Benson group and is responsible for managing funds on behalf of private investors.
In the KBIM Business Systems department we first started using CA Gen (IEF4.2) in 1991 as part of a complete redevelopment of our strategic systems. The first release of our core systems went into production in 1992. Then the development team changed its emphasis from new development to a situation where development of new functionality was performed in parallel with maintenance and on-going enhancement of a production system.
We initially managed changes to the production systems using the same approach as new development. However we soon recognised that the development process needed to be more structured and disciplined to ensure that the multiple, often overlapping, changes to the production systems were co-ordinated and properly controlled.
The process for implementing changes into production was controlled by a production support team consisting of only one or two people. A lack of clear and effective documentation of the changes that had been applied to models, plus a lack of support tools, meant that the implementation of code into integration test and production was time-consuming and error-prone. Implementation became a bottleneck in our development cycle. It was not unusual for us to take over a week to transfer simple changes from development to production. Many change releases suffered from errors due to the manual nature of the implementation process.
Implementation of GuardIEn
In late 1994 we conducted a review of configuration management working practices and recognised the need for greater control, preferably with some form of automated support. It was decided that GuardIEn should be evaluated because of its close links to the CA Gen encyclopaedia, and direct support for CA Gen model management and code generation / implementation.
The evaluation showed that GuardIEn could meet our requirements so, in April 1995, the implementation was started. GuardIEn was initially implemented with the default project set-up options slightly modified to support our standard project development life-cycle. A single member of the support team took two weeks to configure GuardIEn and document the current production systems on it. He then gave the developers a two hour presentation on GuardIEn, supplied them with the user guide and brief notes on the KBIM use of the system, and told them to document all changes currently in progress on GuardIEn. The first implementation of a change to the production systems took place in early May. As we became more familiar with the product, we were able to tailor the GuardIEn project set-up options to fit the development life-cycle that we wanted to follow.
GuardIEn automatically maintains a post-production environment where urgent fixes can be developed and tested. We use its change control facilities to reconcile overlaps and contention between changes being undertaken by different team members.
We use GuardIEn to control all deliverables in our production systems, including non-CA Gen deliverables. This enabled us to use GuardIEn to hold all information on the state of year 2000 compliance, checking and amendment for all deliverables in our production systems during our Year 2000 compliance project.
A key advantage of GuardIEn is its flexibility in allowing us to control the project according to our own development standards. As our experience with the new standards evolved it was easy to reconfigure GuardIEn to support new practices.
Conclusion
"GuardIEn lets us make the most of CA Gen," said James Winter, Implementation Co-ordinator for KBIM Business Systems.
"Using GuardIEn as a central part of our change management and implementation control procedures allows us to use CA Gen
for rapid development of new systems and enhancements, without compromising current system stability, or incurring a large management overhead. "
"Since we started using GuardIEn to automate the object migration, code generation and code installation, we haven't had a single failure of an implementation to the production system. Production errors caused by our implementation process are a thing of the past."
"Maintenance and enhancement throughput has also increased by a factor of 3. Before GuardIEn we could only manage 5 major and 30 minor implementations per year. Last year we achieved 15 major and 130 minor implementations with fewer staff. This is largely attributed to a more disciplined, standard approach that ensures changes are properly planned and organised. The implementation process is no longer a constraint on development productivity."
"Of most significance to our users, we are now able to implement enhancements much faster, and without error."