Increasing velocity with the Accelerated Delivery Center®

Strengthening the agility of IT departments has evolved to be as critical as cost optimization, as IT increasingly represents the core of business operations.

The ability of an IT department to rapidly react and adapt as the macro business environment changes is now an absolute imperative.

This is reflected in the State of the CIO survey conducted by CIO.com earlier this year. Modernizing applications, aligning IT initiatives with business goals, and driving business innovation were all cited as focus areas by more than a quarter of CIOs surveyed.

Capgemini’s Accelerated Delivery Center (ADC) is specifically designed to enable clients to rapidly scale up the delivery of IT services that include application development and maintenance (ADM) activities. Accelerated Delivery Centers are spaces within key Capgemini delivery locations that enable agile, product-aligned teams to rapidly build and deploy solutions supported by a suite of tools and accelerators. ADCs facilitate collaboration, minimize hand-offs, shape cost efficiency, and enable faster time to market while laying the foundations for large-scale transformations. They are built on cross-functional teams for product-oriented deliveries (PODs), leveraging agile processes to improve software delivery while aligning the backlog to the work that drives the highest business value for the client. Business alignment is reinforced when personnel from the client’s business side receive coaching on developing an agile culture, and take part in agile ceremonies. This approach supports effective processes and incorporates feedback loops for continuous improvement.

These delivery PODs are supported by a common, horizontal team that handles the project management and platform engineering elements of continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) tooling and secured pipelines, maximizing the productivity of the PODs as well as building “Centers of Practices” to enable standardization and industrialization across the enterprise. The DevOps automation platform eliminates manual errors across the flow, and delivers containerized immutable infrastructure for increased reliability in test results.

Delivering for a multinational bank

Faced with challenges in meeting aggressive delivery timelines and disconnects between IT teams and the business, a multinational bank experienced multiple handovers and unstable deliveries. To resolve the issue, Capgemini deployed its ADC model.

Capgemini’s ADC scaled up three PODs of seven resources in just two weeks. Utilizing ADC’s reference architecture, the team auto-generated the baseline application platform, automated builds, and created function and performance test cases using Capgemini’s App Swift Solution accelerator.

This auto-generated, well-structured boilerplate code was production-ready, enabling the developers to follow the same structure and improving team velocity by 30–40 percent. Deployment frequency was also accelerated from quarterly to monthly. All of these combined to improve time to market by 25–30 percent.

In parallel with greater speed, quality increased as defect counts dropped from 3.0 per story point to .2 defects per story point.

Collaboration with the business improved, as the communication gap was reduced through the use of Rapid Design and Visualization (RDV) user stories. These user stories also enabled and optimized test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) practices.

Moving ADC into the future

ADC’s structured delivery model and tooling build a solid foundation for adopting  emerging agentic and Gen AI capabilities. Leveraging agentic capabilities to automatically translate requirements into designs and test cases, autonomously build code snippets, or execute test cases are increasingly becoming a core component of modern application development.

As agentic capabilities mature, the ADC delivery model will see even greater acceleration to drive the business value that CIOs are focused on delivering.