UBS’s COO: 'Hybrid Pods' Accelerate Remote Working Solutions Amid Pandemic

UBS’s hybrid pods—the Swiss bank’s futuristic name for its newly-structured agile software development teams—are adapting to the coronavirus crisis, says Beatriz Martin, COO of UBS Investment Bank and UK CEO for UBS Group.

“The beauty of the hybrid pods is that during these unexpected times, they can re-scope what they are doing faster, and they can sprint deliver things in a different way,” Martin says.

UBS introduced the hybrid pod structure a year ago, replacing a more traditional, linear-development process with small agile teams. Now amid the global pandemic, the pods have reoriented their focus to support staff working remotely, Martin says.

“Through the pandemic, we have seen that we form new hybrid pods, which are pulling together to build solutions for the traders who are working from home, for example. This has been one of our focuses when we decided how to staff the traders, or which equipment to give the traders that were working from home to make them resilient and comply with the regulatory expectations,” Martin says.

“We have looked at different solutions for turrets, using external vendor solutions, for example, and what we have seen is these pods pulling together quickly, getting the right people around the table and talking about what we think are the right solutions as we go along.”

A Year On

Prior to introducing the hybrid pods, UBS, like many of its peers, employed a waterfall-style model of software development, where the product requirements would cascade along a chain from IT to business users to end users. If the client—whether internal or external—wanted additions, those requirements would be passed back along the chain.

“The time that passes between writing the business requirements to the IT organization, the IT guys writing their requirements, and then going into development, testing and so on, this can take quite a long time—it can be months,” she says. “And meanwhile, you will come to have other additional requirements, or you will have completed the old requirements, or added or taken out some of the things that you are delivering that you thought were important but that you now think are kind of redundant.”

The bank wanted to take a more iterative approach to software development. In May 2019, phase one of the hybrid pods was introduced. The hybrid pods are small teams (hence “pods”) of about three to eight people drawn from across the bank; anyone can join a pod (hence “hybrid”).

Martin says, however, that an engineer should be included so that the product aligns with the IT architecture of the investment bank, product owners should be able to articulate the outcome the pod is trying to achieve, and developers themselves should be included. Anyone in UBS can decide they want to build a product, and recruit others to join a pod to make it happen. Martin says this builds a sense of ownership over the product among the pods.

“People have taken it as a challenge to do something differentiating for the bank, and we currently have around 400 hybrid pods that we are tracking in [our enterprise automation solution] Blueprint,” she says.

And because the pods are hybrid, they can be built from the ground up with input from, for example, legal or compliance experts, and/or risk and finance.

“The idea was to put the teams closer together in one pod so they could look at [a product] properly from different angles, and get a complete picture instead of a partial view,” Martin says.

One of the conversations the banks has been having about the pods is whether or not pod members need to be in the same geographic location. With its developers being mainly in India, this was not always easy to achieve. It has had the benefit, however, that during a time when everyone is working from home, it hasn’t caused significant disruption to their operations. 

Internal Successes

Martin says an early successful project was from the global equity derivatives business, which brought an entirely new application for actively-managed certificates to production in under six months. This pod now runs weekly show-and-tell events with trading and sales, and so it can respond quickly to changes in requirements.

Since then, a pod that named itself Alerting Gear has automated sales activity across foreign exchange (FX) clients. The CSA Digitization pod has automated the processing of onboarding collateral service agreements. The Skylab pod built a cloud solution in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in three months, which addressed a need for more storage and analytics for Evidence Lab, a team that builds research reports for clients based off of alternative datasets. And the Neo Darwin pod built the user interface for UBS’s e-commerce platform. This pod reduced the time of its releases from 20 working days to five by automating its change-management process, allowing it to more quickly respond to user feedback and evolving business requirements.

Phased

UBS is now moving to phase two of the pod scheme. Phase one created just under 400 pods with 2,500 people in them. Phase two will be about optimizing these pods.

“We are going to focus on assigning product managers to each pod, making sure we have a digital book of work for each of the pods, introducing DevOps metrics to help teams measure and optimize their delivery, and coaching and training people, which is very important,” Martin says. “So we are scaling the campaign to cover, if we can, the whole of the investment portfolio—that would be my desire. And then to establish communities to share knowledge across the pods.”

UBS said last year that it had cut over 8,000 jobs in its external workforce over the two years prior, primarily in technology operations, replacing these with 5,000 internal roles. This was done to cut spending, bring expertise in-house and speed up automation.