BforBank is Crédit Agricole’s online bank. Created in 2009, it offers customers day-to-day banking services, a comprehensive range of savings products and personalized financial services.
BforBank helps its customers to play an active part in managing their finances in complete safety, offering extended hours for customer services, emergency assistance, concierge services, a website accessible from all devices and a mobile app.
In positioning itself as the the first online-only banking provider, BforBank’s key priority was maintaining a high level of quality across its applications. The company was urgently seeking a way to efficiently manage bugs and incident requests, and needed a solution that offered scalability in the long-term. After considering two other solutions, the team turned to Jira just a few months after it was launched.
The key point of difference was that it was simple to implement – the tool’s flexibility and the fact that it was ”ready to use” were both decisive factors. Anthony GEA, Application Integrator explains: :
”Jira was the only solution that could be used quickly, and without configuration work. Its intuitive design means users can train themselves and use it straight away.”
What’s more, some members of the team had already used the tool when working on a previous project, and Jira’s integration capabilities with the wider Atlassian suite made it much easier for BforBank to look to the future.
Thanks to Jira and Valiantys’ support, BforBank was able to offer a simple and effective real-time ticketing service with two fields and two statuses – perfectly suited to the 30-person team at the time.
Jira was the only solution that could be used quickly without configuration work. Its intuitive design means users can train themselves and use it straightaway.
Work station management was also quickly incorporated into Jira. Today the software has become BforBank’s central – and indeed only – tool for managing incidents, development, assets and customer support requests. The tool is used across projects, from web developments to data warehouse projects.
The tool also facilitates collaboration between the IT and business teams, closing the gap between departments. While Jira is mainly used by IT teams on a day-to-day basis, the software is employed as a cross-functional tool for request handling, with business teams able to track the progress of their requests in read-only mode.
Anthony explains:
”The bank has grown significantly since we introduced Jira in 2010. It was not only a question of managing requests, but tracking them through to production. Now the whole tracking process is accessible through Jira.”
BforBank, requests made by the business are presented in the form of ”project” documents, either managed in Confluence or, if simpler, directly as Jira requests. More complex requests often need to be studied in detail, and upon approval become projects in Jira.
Anthony emphasizes that ”splitting the project into different stages in the software means we can then track the progress and status of tasks.” Business teams can access content in read-only mode for visibility into new versions of BforBank’s web and banking applications. Jira also allows BforBank to manage version control by keeping track of all changes within each version of an application.
The team is particularly enthusiastic about Jira’s ability to connect to other Atlassian applications. As well as collaborative content management within Confluence, teams have also linked source code to its relevant Jira application to optimize traceability, make updates easier and facilitate automation.
After several years of using Jira, BforBank’s teams remain convinced of the tool’s benefits, and have enhanced these with numerous add-ons. This has helped the team reach its goal of long-term scalability. What teams particularly appreciate, Anthony continues, is the way that Jira ”enables symbiosis between various sources of information through a single tool and on a per-project basis.”
Today, there’s no shortage of Jira projects in the pipeline. What’s more, teams are keen to go a step further by rationalising fields and workflows, which are beginning to become numerous as the software is more freely used.
”For our main projects we want as few workflows as possible, particularly to facilitate automatic updates of task statuses”, Antony explains.
Automating status changes for Jira batches is also underway in order for teams to automate request tracking across multiple Atlassian applications.
