How Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Achieved Top‑Tier DevOps Maturity Across 8 Projects

Enterprise practice and data show that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success; the DevOps standard and a continuous‑delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve software development efficiency, speed, flexibility, and core competitiveness.

On 18 November 2021, the GOPS Global Operations Conference, co‑hosted by GreatOPS, OOPSA and the DevOps Era Community, opened in Shanghai, aiming to share advanced technical ideas and best practices.

At the conference, Zhang Xueli, Director of the East China Branch of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), announced the 15th batch of DevOps standard continuous‑delivery assessment results. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB) participated with four projects: Retail Compliance Risk Monitoring System, LePu Community System, KaoPu Salary Digital Financial Service Platform, and Smart Office Management System. All four passed the level‑3 continuous‑delivery assessment of the R&D‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model .

Earlier, on 22 October 2021, CAICT released the 14th batch results, with SPDB evaluating eight projects: Unified Clearing Platform, Payment and Settlement System, Industry Customer Insight Platform, Zero‑Loan Command Management Platform, Retail Compliance Risk Monitoring System, LePu Community System, KaoPu Salary Digital Financial Service Platform, and Smart Office Management System. All eight also passed level‑3.

Interview with SPDB Vice‑President Wan Hua

Wan Hua introduced SPDB’s IT department (over 4,000 staff) and the eight evaluated systems, describing their functions—from clearing and payment processing to industry analytics, digital finance services, and smart office management.

The assessment helped SPDB identify gaps, standardize requirements, design, development, testing, and operations processes, and achieve end‑to‑end continuous delivery, improving efficiency and quality. It also fostered a DevOps culture and cultivated talent.

Key improvements include:

Aligning project teams with the DevOps maturity model to close gaps and standardize delivery.

Building a collaborative DevOps culture and nurturing skilled engineers.

Challenges arose from differing understandings of DevOps, varied technology stacks, architectures, and deployment environments across the eight systems. SPDB addressed these by strengthening the DevOps platform, adopting agile team structures, and leveraging container services for consistent, scalable deployments.

Future plans focus on:

Extending assessment‑derived improvements to more project teams and establishing a bank‑wide DevOps implementation standard.

Continuously enhancing the DevOps platform to accelerate transformation.

Training more DevOps talent.

Wan Hua emphasized that DevOps is a critical factor for digital transformation, integrating platform, process, and people to enable rapid, sustainable value delivery.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, jointly developed by CAICT, cloud‑computing open‑source alliances, GreatOPS, BATJ, and major financial and telecom enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard, officially released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and recognized by the ITU‑T in July 2020.

It covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, systems, and tools.

Industry Participation

Data (as of 18 Nov 2021) shows numerous joint‑stock banks have taken part in the DevOps maturity assessments, with varying numbers of evaluated projects.

For further information on DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT (Liu Kailin) or GreatOPS (Dong Hui) via the provided phone numbers and email addresses.