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Rabobank's Reporting cluster is responsible for the financial and risk reports that are purchased by both external and internal parties. To produce these reports, the Risk and Finance unit uses a data warehouse application where all financial data is collected and conveniently arranged for various reporting purposes.
High-performance team
To make this data warehouse application more robust and to further professionalise the team working on it, Rabobank turned to Sopra Steria for its extensive experience with High Performance Teams (HPTs). Sopra Steria's HPTs are multidisciplinary teams with an ideal mix of expertise and personalities that, in co-creation with the client, are able to achieve the client's goals as effectively and efficiently as possible. A hallmark of an HPT is the short cycle of work to achieve the set goals quickly and the continuous focus on development and feedback.
Information factories
According to Robbert Windsant, Delivery Manager Reporting of the Risk and Finance unit, the existing data warehouse application needed to become more stable, more predictable and easier to maintain.
"The application is important because it allows us to structurally prepare data for business partners. We are responsible for setting up several information factories, which are the layer between data and reporting. At the same time, we want to take the team to a higher professional level, because more and more is being asked of IT. One of the biggest challenges for Rabobank is to move applications to the cloud. The cloud is not new, but the speed at which we want to achieve it is. At the same time, you have to deal with old applications that need to be phased out, the increasingly stringent requirements of regulators such as AFM and De Nederlandsche Bank, and the security aspect is also becoming more and more important. All in all, this is a considerable challenge."
Taking the team to the next level
To turn the Ocean team into a high-performance team, a number of things had to happen. Robbert: "We wanted to further professionalise the team and take it to a higher level in terms of team and tooling. Achieving this was quite a challenge. We had to find the right combination of soft and hard skills. We replaced part of the team with new people. And now we have a very good team that has grown in terms of maturity and complements each other very well in terms of expertise."
Great progress made
Robbert is delighted with the solution delivered and the collaboration with Sopra Steria. "We have made enormous progress with the Ocean team during this process. Thanks to coaching sessions, team building activities and improvement suggestions, the team has become better and more stable. I couldn't have done it without Sopra Steria, together we make the difference."
"We are not there yet, but the improvements we have made have been very good. Ultimately, you want to get a self-managing team that can respond to resources that may or may not be right for the team without guidance. We want to get the team to the point where processes are second nature and the team is aligned with the business and high performing. Sopra Steria not only delivered what we asked for, but also thought critically about the next steps and was the perfect sparring partner. She gave me a lot of inspiration and energy. Of course, there is still room to accelerate, but that will definitely happen. Ultimately, the architecture will make it an automated process that will allow us to deliver even faster."