China Galaxy Securities is a Chinese state-owned investment bank, primarily engaged in the securities brokerage business. With diverse and complex financial operations scaling into billions of dollars, the company relies heavily on its digital technology to make informed, timely decisions and maintain optimal processes.
The bank continuously creates new capabilities and product functionality to support its investors and internal operations — investing heavily into research and development (R&D). But with almost 1,000 employees dedicated to digital R&D, outsourcing and vendor management, supporting collaboration and enabling continuous digital transformation became a significant challenge.
From new metrics to complete process visibility
Following a successful smaller project with Thoughtworks — and our collaboration with another leading securities firm in China — the China Galaxy Securities team asked us to help them optimize their R&D process and identify areas that could be improved to increase efficiency and accelerate digital transformation.
We took a multi-phase approach to make that happen, starting by establishing clear and consistent R&D metrics and standardized practices that could be rolled out across China Galaxy Securities’ extensive R&D operations. Together, those changes helped bring some much-needed transparency to R&D across the organization.
Once that transparency had been established, we were able to begin the second phase of our engagement. This involved comprehensive measurement and analysis of the firm’s software development lifecycle, and the practices taking place across it.
Because software development can be such a complex process, efficiency governance issues are often non-standardized and in some cases, complicated. In live development scenarios like within China Galaxy Securities, it’s common to have multiple projects running in parallel, which demands well-defined standards for the allocation of organizational resources, task division and development processes.
After ensuring those standards were in place across the firm, the final phase of the project was to build a platform that unified visibility over all of China Galaxy Securities’ newly standardized R&D operations. By unifying comprehensive metrics spanning project management, process management, system testing and development engineering practices, we helped China Galaxy Securities establish a foundation for the continuous monitoring and improvement of R&D efficiency governance.
Efficiency governance transformation enables continuous R&D improvement
By integrating cross-domain R&D data and metrics from multiple perspectives — including projects, iterations, tasks, personnel and code repositories — China Galaxy Securities now has a robust foundation for the continuous monitoring and improvement of its R&D and digital transformation efforts.
So far, we’ve deployed over 170 key metrics and 50+ analytical scenarios, covering nearly a thousand R&D personnel. The platform had an immediate tangible impact on the firm and its digital transformation efforts, which saw it receive the third prize in the People's Bank of China 2022 Fintech Development Awards.
But this is just the beginning of the firm’s efficiency governance transformation journey. With the new platform and metrics in place, it has since built an R&D management dashboard that uses data insights to continuously identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
China Galaxy Securities is extremely committed to this transformation. It is now building a dedicated team to oversee R&D efficiency governance, using data to build awareness at the management level, and developing new data-driven practices. Next, the plan is to take the lessons learned in R&D and apply them across the entire organization to create a continuous improvement feedback loop.
Eventually, the firm aims to use its robust new data foundation to explore AI-powered efficiency governance models which can provide teams with more precise problem analysis and improvement suggestions.
We have collaborated with the Thoughtworks team to build a digital platform focused on improving the efficiency of the R&D governance process, breaking away from the traditional governance mindset centered around measurement, assessment, and control. We have redefined a new model for quality and efficiency management, shifting from control to empowerment. This not only brings significant economic benefits but also promotes the establishment of a scientifically reasonable efficiency measurement index system for the industry.