ita consulting group

The Situation • The Action • The Outcome

Strategic Direction: With the US market maturing, the greatest opportunity for organizational growth laid overseas.

Business Initiative: A global division was established and targets were set based on the company's ability to quickly establish themselves in the international market.

Projects: Individual systems were built to meet the immediate need and enable Countrywide to gain entry into the international marketplace and capitalize on the growth opportunity.

Company: Countrywide Home Loans
Founded: 1969
Employees: 13,000
Branches: 500
Domestic Loan Portfolio: $285 billion
Global Loan Portfolio: Service 750,000 loans, Processed 10,000

Background: Countrywide is the largest domestic mortgage lender in the United States. By focusing on their technology infrastructure, they have been able to set an extremely high quality standard in loan origination and servicing efficiency.

Strategic Direction: Quickly bring Countrywide's quality and efficiency standards to their products and services in the international market.
Business Initiative: Now that they had succeeded in the initial expansion to the global market, they needed to develop the scalability of their global products at a quality standard consistent with their domestic products.
Projects: Production failures were, obviously, not acceptable. In approaching the fix for this, ITA first assessed, analyzed and documented the quality baseline. Within the context of the enterprise strategic direction, and with attention to both immediate and long-term strategy, a set of recommendations and a solution plan was made.

Exactly what Countywide needed first was a fix to their production issues, and they needed an immediate solution.
The first focus was therefore on tactical specifics. In order to implement a low cost, fast turnaround quality improvement plan that utilized "quick hits" for maximum result,&NBSP; ITA developed Rapid Process Improvement InitiativeTM, which included:

Requirements Verification Testing (RVT) Pilot Program Launch
Defined entry and exit criteria for all process steps
Proposed and implemented organization realignment for quality management
Developed post-implementation review process

Secondly, ITA recognized the long-term need for Countrywide to develop a more mature, repeatable system that would avoid production quality issues. The partners brought to the client an awareness of the need for a larger improvement and a plan to make it a reality. They looked for capabilities within the client organization, mentored and guided that team to empower Countrywide to carry the plan out on their own. This long focus quality strategy included:

Planning the movement to a scalable, repeatable processes based on the Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturing Model (CMM) framework, which was being implemented throughout the rest of the organization
Recommending the creation of a quality umbrella organization
Assisting in the hiring of a quality manager to better equip the organization to make far-reaching quality decision internally
Creating objectives and work plans with Countrywide teams so that this movement could be performed internally

At the Project Level

ITA has been instrumental in supporting our organization as we moved to quickly integrate quality into our software development process. Their constant focus on developing internal capabilities has insured that the benefits of their work won't be lost after their engagement is concluded.

L. Daniel Crowley
First Vice President Quality Management
Countrywide Global Technologies

At the Strategic Level

When we hired ITA, we had an immediate, challenging project ahead of us. I had confidence that a team with their talent and experience could provide us with real insight and help. What I didn't expect was how much value they added to how we approached the problem in relation to our long-term goals and needs. I couldn't have asked for more.

Omer Simeon
Executive Vice President
Countrywide Global Technologies

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