It is not every day that mainframe teams find themselves in the spotlight. That is why it was exciting to see developers showcased at the recent Computer Measurement Group (CMG) award ceremony. CMG honored Legal & General (L&G) with the coveted 2024 IMPACT Innovation Award for Project iMpala, which demonstrated the power of developer empathy and culture change to drive mainframe transformation.
Radical Growth Demands Radical Change
L&G’s mainframe transformation was prompted by far-reaching structural and regulatory reforms in the pension product arena. These changes caused their business to scale rapidly — so rapidly that L&G was maxing out their mainframe development capacity.
L&G faced a choice. On the one hand, they could opt to move core mainframe applications to the cloud to benefit from DevOps speed and agility. Such a “lift and shift” would, however, pose a risk to the applications and therefore to the smooth functioning of business operations.
Alternatively, L&G could bring DevOps speed and agility to the mainframe. This was deemed preferable, as the mainframe had long served them well and was the ideal platform for their systems of record and policy administration. It had the speed, reliability, and security critical for their business model.
L&G’s strategy, therefore, was to optimize the role of the mainframe to support a new level of business agility. They recognized that successfully modernizing and accelerating mainframe application development would depend entirely on their developers’ willingness to embrace change.
Empathy and Design Thinking
Institutionalized processes such as those ingrained in a mainframe organization are not re-engineered overnight. Transformation is a journey and, for L&G, that journey began with a high-profile project. Impalas are not only among the world’s fastest land animals: they are one of the most agile as well, with the ability to leap up to 10 feet vertically and clear 30 feet in a single bound. Speed and agility are exactly what L&G needed to achieve, and so Project iMpala was born.
The team set out to improve the health and vitality of their mainframe pension applications by easing and increasing its accessibility to developers. Recognizing that the biggest challenge would be the cultural aspects of change, the project team conducted numerous design thinking workshops to understand their developers’ perspectives on DevOps and contemporary development practices.
L&G project lead Bharghava Vamsi Bhogireddy notes, “Having empathy for the end user is key. It is vital to know their pain points and to design the solution with that in mind. For instance, we could have just thrust people into Git, but they would have resented and resisted the change. Instead, we needed to take people on a journey. It would take longer but would have better results.”
One of the key findings of the workshops was that the mainframe developers did not know the possibilities of modern integrated development environments (IDEs), virtualized mainframe environments, data virtualization, code scanning, shift-left testing, or parallel development. To gain buy-in, the project team provided systematic education on the benefits of modernization.
Peak Productivity in Both Worlds
Understanding the benefits of modernization is one thing. Actualizing those benefits is another. The iMpala project team found that some of L&G’s veteran developers were only comfortable coding in native Endevor while others only operated in Git. This divide was problematic to mainframe optimization.
Fortunately, there was a solution that could bring these disparate coding worlds together: Hybrid Git. With Hyrid Git, developers can choose which tool to use. A veteran programmer can use native Endevor while a colleague uses Git to code on the mainframe — even if they are working on the same application at the same time — allowing veteran developers to learn Git at their own pace while also opening up a world of modern IDEs and more.
This level of flexibility is possible due to Endevor Bridge for Git, which maintains a synchronized source control mirror in the enterprise Git server with the main code repository residing in Endevor. In this way, Bridge for Git avoids the “lift-and-shift” risk inherent in moving source code.
Of key importance for L&G, Hybrid Git addressed the challenge of how to minimize pressure and distress among their developers. Developers could elect to work on the mainframe in their tool of choice, either Endevor or Git. Mainframers who were unfamiliar with Git could then build modern DevOps skills over time without disrupting existing processes and team productivity.
The Numbers Shout Out Loud
As a result of implementing a Hybrid Git solution in 2023, L&G has established a strong continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capability and adopted a DevSecOps model for their critical mainframe applications. They now support continuous planning, integration, validation, provisioning, deployment, testing, and monitoring. Endevor Bridge for Git has enabled them to attract and retain engineering talent, eliminating key-person risk and building a culture characterized by collaboration.
The specific numbers are remarkably impressive:
- There has been a 300% improvement in developer productivity.
- Provisioning that used to take six months can be done in under one hour.
- There has been zero engineering downtime due to environment contentions.
- They have been able to reduce the number of physical mainframes required for their workload by14 without replacing them with any other platforms, benefitting from the associated carbon footprint reduction.
- Test data refreshes can be completed in minutes rather than days.
- Changes can be delivered in less than four hours to pre-production.
- Developer happiness now ranks at a score of 4.7 out of 5.0.
These remarkable achievements have not gone unnoticed. They demonstrate that the CMG IMPACT Innovation Award was well-deserved!
The Modern, Innovative Mainframe
L&G’s Project iMpala proves that mainframe teams deserve their time in the limelight — and that the mainframe is as modern and innovative as any other platform. By prioritizing the developer experience and leveraging strategic technologies and partnerships, businesses can take full advantage of the mainframe’s remarkable versatility, speed, consistency, and security. In this manner, the mainframe will continue to play its foundational — and starring — role in business for decades to come.
