Engineering Excellence in Regulated Environment: €2 Million Revenue Retention, €6 Million Pipeline

Problem Statement

Flagship engagement with 4 teams (32 engineers) in highly regulated banking environment had no delivery governance.

Our client, a Tier-1 bank, operated with a top-down hierarchy, resulting in slow decision making and siloes. We needed to establish engineering excellence from scratch to prove extreme value in this flagship engagement.

Challenges

• No continuous improvement culture
• 2-month onboarding time
• Teams struggled to work efficiently
• No automation, limited testing environments, bureauctratic approval processses
• Slow-moving technical gatekeepers
• High stakes: Losing this make-or-break engagement would significantly damage our reputation

My Approach

• Diagnosis: Client needed systematic engineering practices but couldn't transform all at once. Careful stakeholder alignment required across directors, managers, scrum masters, tech leads AND client management.
• What I built: Architected engineering excellence framework.

The Framework

The engineering excellence framework covered:

• Delivery standards and quality gates.
• Requirements flow and refinement processes.
• Continuous improvement mechanisms.
• Team working agreements.
• Technical standards (eg. LLDs, automation, testing)

Adoption strategy

• Started with quick wins - small, achievable tasks (eg. "Use the Low Level Design template once")
• Delegated actions to scrum masters & tech leads.
• Weekly check-ins.
• Assisted teams in breaking down complex processes and defending their requests (eg. environment analysis to break down their environment needs over the next 18 months).
• Constant engagement with resistant client technical leaders to push decisions forward.

Impact

• €2 million annual revenue retained.
• Client requested program expansion to the whole division including other projects.
• Case study helped secure €6 million deal with another client the following year.