How Nationwide restructured to enhance agility

Aubrey Stearn flattened the hierarchy and promoted ownership in Nationwide's NDAP department

Aubrey Stearn, a CTO at Nationwide Building Society ("Which is not a bank, and I definitely believe that"), spent her Christmas building a new model to process work at the company's Digital Accelerator Platform - enhancing agility in a department already focussed on it.

Stearn is not the overall CTO of Nationwide, but instead leads the Digital Accelerator Platform (NDAP). "If Nationwide is England," she says, "this is like being the CTO of Birmingham."

When Stearn joined Nationwide in mid-2018, she found that NDAP had issues with the delivery and visibility models - hence the busy Christmas period spent building an entirely new model to process work, which is based on "All the things I know as an engineer delivering work, and all the things that I've learned as a leader."

Although there will always be a need for a hierarchy in business, the new model is as flat as possible by design. At the top are a delivery lead, responsible for adhering to the roadmap; and a CTO (Stearn), responsible for making technical decisions. Below them comes a navigation team and, at the bottom, all of the squads.

The navigation team are not necessarily technical; among other things they are responsible for governance, which is important in a large financial institution, but which "developers and engineers are really really bad at." In addition they catch a lot of items that slip past the leadership team: "I know I can sit in a meeting and commit to doing a bunch of stuff, but I'm really crap at taking notes and I probably won't go and do it," says Stearn. "Often I delegate to the navigation team.

"Any time there's a function that, as an engineer, we're not good at, we protect them by making sure that the navigation team is there to start picking that stuff up - a lot like a SCRUM master."

Below navigation are the squads, each with four engineers, an engineering lead and a SCRUM master. These teams "can run and deliver anything however they want," and have been set up to have total autonomy. "I just care about having a viable machine that allows me to put work into it and get work out in a somewhat predictable manner."

Forming a sense of these squads as teams was so important that, as well as the normal corporate bonding sessions, Nationwide brought an artist in to design logos for each one: think a coat of arms for a DevOps squad. "This gave them an identity and it was very powerful in terms of ownership and making them proud of what they were doing," said Stearn.

At the same time as implementing a new process model, Stearn was redesigning NDAP's support model. Previously there was a team of six people who worked on support full-time: "They were the only people who understood all the systems in NDAP, and were probably out best engineers at that point because of the nature of being on support."

Now NDAP uses daily rotations of people from different squads to provide support, which has turned out to be a "great way" of upskilling people who lack experience.

NDAP only hires programmers - there is no test team or QA staff; no-one to check the engineers' work but them. This "forces the developer mentality of owning something," said Stearn. It is a smaller-scale example of the ‘everything' model of DevOps, and so is easier to sell to the board.