Public sector
Payments, team of 10, zero outages.
Three KPIs at a glance, then the structured story below.
Headline
Payments, team of 10, zero outages.
A previous larger team attempt to deliver a critical payments platform had stalled. Cost was high, confidence was low, and a regulator-facing deadline was approaching. The brief was clear in outcome and unclear in path: a payments system that processes at scale, never goes down, and is auditable end to end.
- Straight through processing
- 99.99%
- Outages in 2+ years
- 0
- Cheaper than prior larger team
- 50%
Challenge
A previous larger team attempt to deliver a critical payments platform had stalled. Cost was high, confidence was low, and a regulator-facing deadline was approaching. The brief was clear in outcome and unclear in path: a payments system that processes at scale, never goes down, and is auditable end to end.
Approach
A team of 10. Outcome first PM. XP engineering discipline applied without compromise: TDD throughout, CI/CD from day one, pair programming on every critical path. The strangler fig pattern to absorb existing dependencies. Two security audits run in parallel with delivery. We did not skip the discipline to make the date. The discipline made the date.
Outcome
The platform has been in production for over two years with zero outages. 99.99% straight through processing. Two clean security audits in production. Delivered at half the cost of the previous, larger team attempt. The system is owned and maintained today by the client’s engineering team, with documentation and tests they can read.
“The team that scoped the work did the work. The discipline they brought is what kept us on the date.”