OTE Group: Journey Towards a Culture of Quality Excellence

OTE Group is the largest technology company in Greece. It is one of the top three listed companies with respect to capitalization in the Athens Stock Exchange and is also listed in the London Stock Exchange. OTE Group employs approximately 11,500 people in Greece and approximately 16,000 people in total.

OTE Group offers a wide range of telecom services, fixed, mobile, TV and integrated ICT solutions alongside an ecosystem of additional vertical offerings. OTE Group IT landscape consists of Digital Channels, CRM systems, back office and operational applications.

The Challenge

• Complex environment with both in-house and external development.
• 50+ IT vendors and integrators both onshore & off-shore.
• Each vendor has different quality standards, development processes and operating models leading to high level of effort and cost.

The SIG Solution

• Started with a pilot on a few systems and a few vendors. Extended the engagement by adding more systems, more technologies and more vendors into Sigrid.
• Monitoring the quality, the performance and the security of OTE’s core & customer facing applications.
• Put in action a continuous plan for code improvement and refactoring.
• Streamlined the software delivery process.
• Onboarding new teams & vendors on an established unified quality software lifecycle.

The Result

• New QA Processes.
• Reduced 50% post deployment production issues.
• 10 of the biggest vendors are already on board.
• 0 incidents related to system unavailability on release days.
• Increased footprint of source code evaluation from 1 system in 2017 to 22 as of now & up to 30 by 2023.
• A change of culture and attitude to achieve continuous improvement. Not only by building a quality excellence culture inside the teams but also by leading the broader IT ecosystem.

“I really value the patience and consistency of the SIG team in onboarding different vendor teams one-by-one based on great collaboration.”

– Yannis Vitzilaios, Customer Systems Director at OTE Group