Cognizant and Severn Trent Water (STW) recently received the Most Successful Cultural Transformation Award from the DevOps Industry Awards. The DevOps Industry Awards recognize those companies who have “accomplished significant achievements when incorporating and adopting DevOps practices.”

One of the UK’s largest water service companies, STW embarked on a digital transformation two years ago with the intent to change the company’s DNA to that of a digital native organization. The company wanted to drive cultural transformation to enable their organization to take advantage of Agile and DevOps ways of working. The company faced the challenge of not only streamlining more than 350 applications but also working within the constraints set by the water regulatory agency in the UK.

Working with Cognizant Digital Engineering, STW introduced an all-inclusive change management program that addressed the cultural shifts needed to best facilitate the technology department’s transformation. By undergoing a series of assessments, Cognizant was able to identify the areas where cultures were most vulnerable to change, and concentrated their efforts there, identifying six value streams to serve as the mechanism to deliver continuous value to the customer.

Through their work, Digital Engineering team has:

• Moved from three-month software release cycles to four-week windows, saving approximately 3,900 hours in infrastructure provisioning, building and testing.
• Improved lead time for starting new projects by 75%.
• Increased Right-First-Time statistics by 40%.

In addition, anonymous survey results show that 85% of the team now believes they are empowered, 90% feel they belong and 78% feel they can empathize with other collaborating team members.

“Cultural transformation is difficult under the best of circumstances,” said Rohit Gupta, VP Europe, Cognizant. “With regulatory oversight and the need for STW to be competitive in the marketplace, we knew there was a great opportunity for a strategic customer management program. Our approach to assessing first the overall organization, identifying where improvements could be made and continually communicating about changes with all stakeholders were key to our success. We are pleased with the changes made at STW and excited that our work has been recognized by DevOps.”