Here's how 108-year-old Liberty Mutual revamped its tech strategy to cut costs and release code 200 times faster
Fortune 100 global insurance company Liberty Mutual recently revamped its tech strategy to bring software development and IT operations closer together — and the firm says the changes have allowed it to launch new products and features dramatically faster.
This shift began five years ago when Liberty Mutual decided to move its software, storage, and more from private data centers to a public cloud and ditch the 49-year-old "waterfall" method of project management (a sequential system) in favor of the agile technique (an iterative, collaboration-centric methodology).
Liberty Mutual also leaned on a set of strategies and technologies known as DevOps — a mashup of "development" and "operations" — meant to help produce applications and services more quickly than conventional software development procedures.
Justin Stone, senior director of DevOps platforms at Liberty Mutual, calls it a "throwing things over the wall" approach.
"We've been on a digital transformation and implementing a DevOps culture across our software engineering teams," Stone said. "With the goal to move faster, prioritize the customer experience, really reduce the friction that comes in the day-to-day operations of our software development teams, and — at the end of the day — drive down some costs in every part of our business."
Ultimately, the firm estimates that it is deploying code 200 times more frequently than it did before making these changes.
The process started with a "base-level education" for the company's more than 45,000 employees spread across 29 countries. Stone, for example, encouraged his teams to read books like Continuous Delivery, The DevOps Handbook, The Phoenix Project, and Accelerate as part of the transition.
The company brought together the operation and development teams so that workers could easily help each other work on projects and troubleshoot issues. Training its developer and operations teams to work together was "really was a jump in maturity for us as an organization," Stone said.
The company rolled out Stack Overflow for Teams, software that allows workers to ask technical questions on an open forum. Teams across the organization started using it and the firm saw an average of 300 searches per week and a 10% decrease in technical questions asked on Slack.
Stone's advice is to start with small teams, listen to feedback from the teams to understand what their pain points are, address those pain points together, and continuously educate individuals to improve their experience.
The benefits of a DevOps approach are worth the work to get there, according to Stone.
"You end up with more stability, less lead time to get your code out the door, and the ability to experiment more frequently," Stone said. "You can provide viable products back to the business swifter than you couldn't in years past."
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